Voxengo Elephant - User Testimonials
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*.
I was at an awards evening a few days ago and it occurred to me just how much I have come to rely on the Elephant Limiter.
Like most professional mastering engineers, I own a range of top quality limiters (including the old L2 hardware even). However, in my chain anyway, nothing seems to equal the Elephant in terms of getting the best out of the song. I chose it almost 100% of the time.
And it has served me well … in the last little while alone it has seen songs I have mastered go to #1 iTunes, sell double platinum, #2 hot 100, #1 iTunes metal, make the ARIA charts (our equivalent of the RIAA), #1 country radio, over 15 million streams on Spotify alone, win song of the year, artist of the year and so on. All with the Elephant as limiter.
I just wanted to say how much I genuinely appreciate your work on the Elephant. Thank you so very much for such an outstanding limiter!
All the best
I have had a 'bedroom studio' for the last few years and when it came time to look for mixing and mastering tools outside of Logic's own I did a lot of research into the different brands on the market. Voxengo's was a name consistently associated with high praise. Having bought numerous plug-ins from you I attest to the robustness, usability, elegance and effectiveness of the Voxengo tools and the audible improvements they made to my music. The price, when looking at that of the competition, seems pretty cheap.
I use Crunchessor (powerful all-purpose compressor), Drumformer (great results) and Voxformer, Varisaturator, GlissEQ and HarmoniEQ and the smaller ones, like StereoTouch (so good), Warmifier (very subtle when used correctly) and LF Max Punch (instantly rewarding). When I master I always use CurveEQ (brilliant design), Soniformer and Elephant.
As an amateur, it's hard for me to appreciate just how good these plug-ins are, because I've not tried a lot of the comparable tools from other companies, but as Voxengo always does the job in the way I want, I've no desire to look for any replacements. When I used Elephant, I knew I wouldn't need another limiter; it doesn't add any colour to the mix and it's incredibly powerful. The entire mix is simply elevated, louder, with no apparent negatives. The only one I have no idea how to use is Soniformer, but the presets are really solid, so I don't feel the need to investigate further.
The saturation, EQ and compressors in Voxformer helped me fully realise what my voice could be. I had no idea my vocals could sound so full and warm until I used it, and now my singing has matured to match that sound so well that I don't even need to dump loads of effects anymore, just any quick preset on the Voxformer and there you go: thicker, sunnier, glowing.
I'm so stoked I came across this site, and I will definitely get the Polysquasher in the sale this summer.
Hello,
I'm using Elephant for years now, and I'm a very satisfied customer. I'm not an engineer, just a musician, and Elephant helps me to finish my backing tracks before the gigs, and give them the power needed for a big nice sound. To be honest, as I said, I'm not an sound engineer, and never tried to work with the settings, as I don't know what they do. I just use the presets and everything is just fine.
I wanted to express my gratitude to the developper for this wonderful plug-in, which by the way is not expensive, and is doing miracles, at least for me.
Thank you sir, thank you...
After demoing everything out there Elephant stomped on everything! It's versatility and transparency is truly fantastic and it's just got better with each update.
Pretty much nothing leaves the mastering studio without Elephant on it so in that sense it's one of my most used and relied upon processor.
I've also used MSED and SPAN for years and aim to pick up VariSaturator soon.
Top class tools for a very reasonable outlay 10/10
Keep it up and many thanks for your dedication and hard work!