Voxengo HarmoniEQ - User Testimonials
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.
I am using quite a few of your plugins as bus masters for film & TV sound post. Elephant after Polysquasher is fantastic to envelope the final mix and peak limiter for broadcast specs. Voxformer is an excellent way to control and punch vocals without sounding over processed. Soniformer is my preferred plugin for music pre mix stems but until recently, I wasn't quite happy with a compressor for FX stem control, but the new Drumformer is perfect for this.
HarmoniEQ and GlissEQ are both really useful to enhance without fatigue and also interesting EQs to use on denoised material. Great plugins and so reasonable priced. They work perfectly in my Fairlight host.
Woaaa - I just updated Elephant to the latest version as well as I purchased the new Harmony EQ... I am completely blown away by the Harmony EQ - there was always that cryptic "boost" knob in the old version - which usually sounded great, but was not really controllable - so I usually ended up not using it. Now with the new Dynamic Section as well as the realtime analyzer.. Wow!
In addition I just stepped over the graph feature in Elephant. Great great great!! Ok - watching a waveform has nothing to do with mastering.. But I do love to watch that. I am most sure we all do that.. Before I had to open an exported masterfile in Wavelab, haha - now I can see what is going on :)) Now that is really a cool feature!!
Cheers,
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*.
Voxengo Shinechilla,
Voxengo VariSaturator,
Voxengo Warmifier,
Voxengo HarmoniEQ:
Thanks so much for the HarmoniEQ update. It sounds amazing. I'm finally getting the sounds on my songs that I've been trying to get for years. I use it in my mastering chain. It gives me a airy presence that's not harsh. The compressed settings are just great. They give me a smoothness that I've been looking for for my solo classical guitar pieces that have been difficult in the past.
The mastering chain I've been using recently, all Voxengo, is Tapebus, CurveEQ, Polysquasher (also a great update-wow!), HarmoniEQ, Elephant. I've been having a lot of success with that combo but I'm wondering if you have any suggestions or feedback about it. Thanks for your great work.
hallo,
just wanted to tell you, that i am absolutely happy with harmoniEQ 2.0!
i used version 1.0 quite a lot in the past, but it went in the background a little over time.
now with version 2.0 it is back again :-). what a great tool, i used it in a lot of occasions, from whole mixes to single tracks. i got perfect results for my needs, in very short time, from adding presence and grip/transient-emphasizing (i used it for this a lot) to making sounds mellow and smooth.
in a recent project, i had to bring a lot of very different acoustic-recordings in balance with each other. it ranged from heavy percussion to choir-singing/flute/cello. i got it done with heavy use of harmoniEQ in very short time. no fiddling with eqs and compressors/expanders, just tuning in the right frequencies, a little finetuning with the settings and done.
this a great addition to my toolset. i am amazed that there is not much more rumor about it :-).
best greetings,
Voxengo Voxformer,
Voxengo Polysquasher,
Voxengo VariSaturator,
Voxengo Overtone GEQ: