sooo.. ive been thinking

is it gonna make someone like/dislike more my music?
are people gonna unconsciously notice the difference?
if i use Analog Obsession instead of UAD
waves instead of acustica
or is it irrelevant at the end?

 

Of course it matters. And people will definitely notice the difference in your results.

Did you watch the Dan Worrall video about Harrison Mixbus? What he was saying, to simplify; was that these guys were saying they did circuit modeling and lots of work creating their program/plugin from scratch.

What he found, and called them out for; was using recycled code from some place. Like that old Synth Edit deal.

When you are looking at OOP (object-oriented programming), many of the environments you program things in come with generic component objects. Rather than re-writing the object, they just use the stock object for that knob, slider, or other control. They are not coding a low-pass filter, they are selecting an object which contains generic code from a menu, and slapping it onto the gui.

Those are the $5 programs you see some kid "code" for a class project. At a real developer level, those guys are writing custom code for the entire project; not recycling generic junk. So of course there is a difference.

 

As the guy from the Airwindows plugins says on his website, "in mix, nobody can hear your screen" (a little pun on the tagline of 1979's movie Alien).

Of course, we see time and time again some companies releasing so-called snake oils and poorly developed plugins that cause more problems in a mix instead of solving them, but IMO it doesn't really matter which plugin from whatever brand you use, as long as it sounds good in the end.

 

Those are some great points!
I havent watched the video but i remember the "scandal" with harrison's reply to the video

definitely gonna take this into account on my next choices

 

Yes! thank you for your input.
that's kind of what i was wondering myself

 

Soundwise, yes

 

Last edited: Feb 20, 2024

it only matters to you and what benefits your workflow / end results. 95% of end user cant even tell the difference between a good mix or bad mix. Majority of songs that blow up on tik tok are clipped to hell, slowed and reverbed, or pitched up and distorted.

 

that's a very good point too!

tik tok songs are horrible

 

just watched Worrals video on Harrisons strip.
that's just crazy, what a crazy company

 

To a certain degree, they do and don't matter.
In my opinion - as was stated before - different brands have their specific workflow and design philosophies that mostly affect how it feels to use a specific brand of plugin. Efficiency within the code itself can also be a factor in large enough projects.

Mostly, if a plugin is well coded and adjusted, there's likely gonna be more of a difference in "spice" rather than "base flavor" between different plugins. I hope that analogy makes sense. As long as you can get 80-90% of the way there, nobody is realistically gonna care about what exactly you used, as long as you didn't misuse the tool and made it sound like crap on accident/purpose.

 

Like OP asked, will they unconsciously know? Yes, they will. What you are saying can be 100% true but it's also sort of an example of Correlation vs Causation. They know which track they like better, because it "Sounds better" to them; but they may have no idea why.

The audio software development business is not based on imaginary differences. Otherwise we would all be using our stock DAW plugins and nothing else. No-one would bother training their ears, because any compressor will do the same thing. etc.

Crazy was their video reply to him. I think they had to take it down due to the responses they got. One of their "main guys" said on camera, "i'm not really a DSP guy"; and the presenter was getting free lessons on their "DAW" he was already recommending.

 

It's mostly irrelevant, if you can't make something worth listening, you can have most polished mix or whatever, most listeners really don't care, their threshold for bearable mixes are much higher then most labels that release same have or most of us that are deep into it. I attended parties where lousy produced tracks made people go nuts, it was enough to get the energy and message to resonate with them. Then you have folks who would rather mute half of that, just so they can have dick measuring contest who have cleaner and louder mix, use reference tracks to extreme copy cat levels, do everything by the formula and numbers, it get's old pretty quickly.

You can have all the tools and still end up with your limits, which is your knowledge, taste and actual music, Waves, UAD or whatever make amazing tools, people are making great results with either of them, if you are really going to patch some area, then start with your room and whole monitoring chain, it will make more difference then nuances between two plugins, which you can't hear properly from the get go anyways.

Tool that you can use properly is the right tool, if you can't hear the difference, then you are never going to use any tool to the fullest. No matter if Acustica plugin have something special, you are the one that have to discover that and utilize it when it's the perfect time for it. There's number of those perfect moves you need to make with number of those tools, relying on your knowledge, taste, ears and vision. It's not just matter of using UAD plugin instead of Waves one.

There's times where fixing or changing the source would make all the difference and make your life so much easier or better arrangement, better composition, few better automation's and etc.

I can go nuts taking every resonance out of piano track so that it plays perfectly on laptops and then I listen to some track people lose their shit on and it's blowing out that speaker and they don't care, they care even less for my lousy music that sounds good on their mobile phone or whatever. Pick your battles, I'm not saying production doesn't matter and people don't hear when something is produced good or not, but they aren't obsessed with it, it doesn't break the track if production isn't top notch, there's fine line between having horrible mix and perfect mix and you can walk in that middle with great music without most of casual people giving that much crap about it.

Thin it was tATu that released demo version of one track, because when they did everything properly, track lost all the essence. There's plenty of older music that have obvious issues in the mix, but people connected to that music and fixing production would just take away from music, which you can even hear now with most of those remastered and reworked versions.

So in the end of the day, it's you who needs to decide and do the proper job, more power to you if you can do that with stock plugins, doesn't take much from you if you made it on Neve/SSL in muti million studio, if that work resonates with people, you did it.

 

Last edited: Feb 20, 2024

another great point. in line with what @Lieglein was saying
even though sonically some might not differ, the UX might differ

 

yes! totally.
most of the times it is worth it to save money and treat the acoustics/upgrade the hardware instead of investing in a new plug-in.

thats another great point. to make mistakes is to be human. some mistakes are just great

Agreed. like in the discussion in the A.I. and compressors thread. The user matters the most

 

No.

What does it matter? They'll only listen to the one released mix/master. Nothing to compare against except other songs, and at that point, there's a million differences to take into account. Even if someone releases a different mix of the same song, it's an entirely different set of decissions.

Irrelevant, if we're talking about end result only, because the sound of the mix was decided BEFORE the release, by you (or someone else involved in the project). There will be no "better sounding brand" because supposedly you picked the best one to be the only one people will hear. And if people didn't like it, then you took the wrong decission.

And i'm using the word "branad" very loosely here, because why would anyone use one brand only on any mix.

 

Brands does not metter,, sounds good is no.1
Research and compared its what i do..

 

another great argument.
they can't A/B our tracks like we do!

good points

 

Some say: There are no stupid questions - only stupid answers.
Responses seem aimed at the right idea but not quite clarifying the issue.

The original questions regarding BRAND is nonsensical, in the way it is posed, because the BRAND does not matter if two different plugins perform exactly the same.
[EDIT: As noted by the OP that might imply some infringement of copyright, but not necessarily.
Even with different coding two might "perform" exactly the same, and by "perform" I mean they could produce the same results.
The differences that no one can hear or detect in use?
Well, those differences are what people argue about, but as far as the OP questions... there is no worry about those differences.]
(A rose by any other name would smell as sweet.)
So...
If Harrison changed their name to Williams, would Williams Mixbus sound the same? Would people notice?
What if they did NOT change their name, but changed the colors or font of the plugins?
Would people subconsciously notice by listening to a mix?

No. Brand names don't mean anything, if that is the only difference.

I think what you want to ask is:
Does VST quality matter?
And the answer to that is YES, of course.
So, when looking for a tool (plugin, hardware,etc) it does make sense to look at well-respected brands.
Why?
1) "Quality" They avoiding problems of phase, aliasing, distortion, etc,
2) "Functionality" They provide good methods of use easy-to-use GUI... maybe accurately modeling the taper of knobs, reactive circuitry, etc for analog -modeling ones... even efficient CPU use can be a consideration.
There are other considerations, but those are 2 big categories often mentioned when people discuss and compare plugins.

As the OP says:
"if i use Analog Obsession instead of UAD
waves instead of acustica
or is it irrelevant at the end?"

I would say YES . The actual name brand IS irrelevant when comparing comparable plugins, and there are plenty of people right now fighting tooth & nail over which name brand does the best job of emulating certain pieces of hardware.
So there is no "winner" for most.

Yes it matters that you have good quality, so at that level name brands DO matter, but when asking "Waves vs. Acustica" & Analog Obsession vs UAD"... you are then beyond whether anyone who hears your music can tell or would care...
You are then into Nerdatory.
It is just like purgatory, but for nerds.
Some people call it Gearspace.

 

Last edited: Feb 20, 2024

sorry i don't get it, why would two different brands have plugins that perform exactly same?
wouldnt that mean they have the same code? isn't that illegal?

i say brand for a lack of a better word from me. should i say developer? does that make more sense?

EDIT: ohhh i get it nowww. the actual brand doesnt matter.

yes! very good takes too!
luckily i don't deal with quality problems very often
CPU use is another story though, and i do often take into consideration (heavy-cpu plugins are a no-no for me)

 

Last edited: Feb 20, 2024

The general public definitely notices when something is very poorly or extremely well engineered. I'd also say different mixes will make a casual listener feel and appreciate the mix in different ways, even if they don't know the reasons why.

However, they absolutely don't care the slightest about what plugins or hardware you used. They don't load your plugins in PluginDoctor to see if they alias. They will just care about how your music sounds. It's much better for a plugin emulation to nail how it sounds with simple, unimpressive DSP that is just well tuned, rather than going to great lengths to implement a complex circuit modeling that sounds bad but just looks better on an analyzer.

Does the Harrison channel strip model the hardware non-linearities ? No. Is it a problem ? Depends... if the non-linearities are inaudible to begin with, is it really necessary to model them ?

Does the Brainworx Millenia TCL-2 model non-linearities ? Yes. Does it sound good ? I think that it sounds like ass.

So is Harrison a bad brand because they told you that they did circuit modeling even though they didn't include inaudible non-linearities ? Hard to say that when other very well regarded brands like Brainworx or Softube have released plugins that acted nothing like the analog hardware they were based on. Nor do I think that we should say that Softube is bad because they used chebyshev polynomials to model tape instead of the much more powerful dynamic convolution/volterra kernels in IK Multimedia's tape plugins. Even trained listeners won't care when they listen to your mix.

What matters in brands of plugins is how they treat their customers, how buggy their releases are, how optimized their code is... That's why some brands like Tokyo Dawn Labs are well regarded with virtually all engineers, whereas Acustica is being roasted for years because their products are a pain in the ass to work with. This has nothing to do with their sound, but with how it makes you more or less confident when you work (without even talking about UI), and how happy your computer is to load them. And THAT has definitely an impact on the end result.

 

Last edited: Feb 20, 2024