Voxengo PHA-979
In a market bloated with 'emulations' of classic gear, it's rare to find juicy sounding plugins that capture the best qualities of 'classic', offer some flexibility and don't break the bank. In the universe of more tweakable plugins, here too only a few offerings stand out.
After years of working with hundreds of plugins from numerous companies, I've found only a handful of offerings that keep me coming back. One of those companies that still hold a top spot is Voxengo. Their plugins are 'analog' without being slavishly limited to a given hardware model; flexible but not overloaded with 'feature bloat'; affordable without sacrificing sound quality; and have excellent & consistent GUIs to work with. A winning combination.
There is definitely a place for well designed emulations of classic gear, but when you require some flexibility and/or modernity, Voxengo is great choice. Their uniform GUIs also promote actually listening to the music!
Voxengo also has an easy robust activation system (no dongles), exceptional reliability (I've never had a Voxengo plugin crash my DAW in 14 years) and full 64 bit floating point processing*.
George Piazza - Fly Mastering, Tomb of the Mysteries, Royal Falcon ServiceIt's pretty simple why Voxengo plugins are so good - Alexsey has a better ear compared to other developers.
His plugins sound so 'musical'. I've used many other plugins that technically perform their designed function, yet somehow just don't sound good.
I now have a whole set of expensive plugins that are just taking up drive space. They simply don't sound as good as thier Voxengo counterparts.
Mark Briody, guitarist for Jag Panzer (Century Media Records)