User Testimonials
I've found TEOTE to be a very interesting and useful tool which allows me to quickly pinpoint issues within my mixes. The configuration parameters are essential to me as it allows fine tuning my sound rather than relying on a generic profile or preset sound.
In my experience, I've found it most useful to place on the master bus after the external compressor and have it reduce problematic regions (limiting how much gain can be applied to 2-3 dB) before going into a transparent software limiter.
Voxengo have the gold standard of user interfaces in my opinion - clean, straightforward, no-nonsense.
Wow! Voxengo knocked it out of the park again with Peakbuster. I've long recommended TEOTE, and this seems to be the perfect-pairing! It's different enough that you want both.
I can't explain what it does -- all I know is it makes my songs sound better. Not in a way that has artifacts, like some other 'betterizers'... Peakbuster "just works" without adding any fatiguing side effects. It adds the kind of magic that when you turn it off --- you turn it back on as quickly as possible and think, "What would I have done if I didn't have this?!"
You think you're done with your mix and then Peakbuster adds something better that you didn't even know you needed, but once you hear it you don't want to remove it.
I'm using Peakbuster with TEOTE, Marquis Compressor, Elephant Limiter, and Span Plus. I EQ on my submix busses, so that's a perfect Voxengo mixbus mastering chain for me.
I'm always happy when I get a plugin that I can use on every track, and all 5 of those fit that bill. Peakbuster is outstanding!
Been using these for about 6 years and I wanted to express how much I appreciate them. HarmoniEQ is such an asset to adding color. In the tradition of the Pultec EQP-1 I often bring frequencies down with the stock Reaper EQ and bring them back up with HarmoniEQ, adding color when I don't even need an EQ adjustment. It's been especially effortless to change an electric guitar's tone when I feel like, "I wish he'd played a tele here instead of that SG." Even after I picked up Warm Audio WA-412 for overall coloration, HarmoniEQ is still invaluable for shaping coloration so I'm less in need of spending thousands on different analog devices to achieve the specific profile I'm after.
I have some feature suggestions, first would be to add a non-colored EQ for pulling down frequencies so the Pultec trick is fully integrated, and also I think it could benefit from higher oversampling factors since the difference between 4x and 8x is plainly audible to me, would love to see 12x, 16x, 24x, and even 32x since CPU is pretty abundant these days. Even folks who are light on CPU can adjust the mix at lower oversampling, then set up a render queue with the oversampling cranked, and have the DAW process it slowly overnight while they sleep.
I still use the old version of SPAN because I'm set in my ways, but also those average and peak RMS readings are such great measures to ensure my mixes are the same general volume.
The bass saturation feature in LF Max Punch gets so much use, even on vocals to give them a "closer" feel to them, on overheads and ambient mics to get more room impact on the lows, places I never would have thought to use them. Brilliant tool!
Elephant is the only remotely pumpy limiter I'll use. I like my mixes to be highly realistic, which means I can't stand LA1176's, but sometimes a bit of pump sets the right tone without sounding desperate. Elephant nails that every time.
Here's some pearls for folks who don't appreciate how awesome a phase adjustment tool PHA-979 is. Any recording that's live or live off the floor with ambient mics, you can use PHA-979 to phase-align direct mics to the ambient mics by adjusting the phase so the lower frequencies combine the most (might actually be nice to have a mono version just for this). Then put a PHA-979 on an aux bus with L/R set to -90/+90, to generate a side channel. Mute the ambient mics and send all your direct mics through that side channel bus and feather it up until you can barely notice the widening effect. Now unmute the ambient mics, and you can't tell where they end and the direct mics begin. It's the glue between the two without the muddying of early reflection reverb. I haven't found any other plug-in that accomplishes that nearly as well as PHA-979, and it's not nearly enough anti-phase to ruin the mix when summed mono.
Voxengo plugs do more than just a good job, they really make the job more enjoyable.