That's an incredibly uninformed point of view. Maybe you should learn to code, it really opens up the horizon in a bunch of ways.

You're just saying that mathematical properties can't be replicated with mathematical code. Many developers around employing entropy systems in plugins for more years than you probably think.

 

This is an exaggeration — and not entirely accurate. Renting time on hardware might be cheaper than buying it outright, but many of these services aren’t exactly “cheap.” And in the end, you’re left as the owner of nothing permanent — kind of like subscribing to Spark or similar services.

It also comes back to the rest of the signal chain. By the time the audio is captured and plugins, IR tools, or outboard are being considered, the preamp is no longer shaping the tone at the input. The interface (or mixer, if used) has already added its own character to the recording.

At that point, it’s just a question of whether you want to use plugins (free or paid), or rent someone else’s gear after the fact. Most of the time, you’ll still come out ahead with plugins or a solid in-the-box chain — and maybe pay for a rental just to polish the final stems. If you’re not printing DSP during tracking, there’s no meaningful difference between plugins and remote hardware for post-processing.

In any case, it’s a bit like showing up at a Toyota dealership to tell buyers they really need a Cadillac instead. After rolling up on a skateboard.
Post some raw/processed examples or it just sounds like telling people to give an online buddy of yours some money.

 

How is it weird to acknowledge that EVERY piece of gear will have a ceiling level of quality? That doesn't mean you can't make good music using cheap gear, you can make great music with ANY gear. I was not tying ability level to gear purchases either, but we all start off with cheaper gear whilst learning and then when we desire greater quality, begin to invest, that's just how it is.

It is no different than a beginner guitarist progressing and then wanting a more expensive (and better sounding) amp after a couple of years. Does that mean their playing will get worse if they went back and used the beginner's amp, NO, obviously not, but that cheaper amp can only ever have a certain level/quality of sound and that is why in time we all want to upgrade our gear.

If it was possible to use purely good mixing skills and the best possible plug-ins to make any audio source "sound pro", why would people bother buying Neumann's/Neves etc? When I said that certain gear can only take you so far, this is what I meant. It has NOTHING to do with mixing skill, NOTHING to do with ability as a musician. Give a highly talented musician a phone recorder and they'll make good music out of it, but if you think that recording will ever have the same fidelity or quality as higher end equipment, it just can't (with current technology). We are all chasing better mixes, and my "take you so far" comment referred to towards that, not towards having a career or getting anywhere as a musician.

I'm not advising anybody to run out and buy outboard purely because "oUtBoARd SoUnDs AmAzE", but so many people who are less experienced and usually 100% ITB are chasing the magic plug-in dragon. I did the same for years. The problem is that for most, by the time you apply these plug-ins, your mic/interface has already left an imprint on the sound that these emulations are put on top of. My experience of doing this is the cheaper interfaces preamps must impart this mud or brittleness to the sound, I always felt like I was fighting my audio whilst mixing and spend most of the time mixing just trying to use EQ to correct the source audio's gremlins, instead of using the EQ to shape the mix into what I actually wanted.

In the end, none of this really matters, all that matters is using the gear your currently have as best as you can. I'm sure my Heritage Audio doesn't sound as good as a real Neve, doesn't mean it can't be used to make good music. As I've said previously regarding plug-ins though, these threads get tiring as they pop up every few months and the same thing always happens. You get most people mentioning UAD, Acustica or the popular brands, then a few people mention Nebula/TimP stuff, then one or two obscure plug-ins, and then somebody will chime in saying they all suck and they prefer their boutique one-of-a-kind hand made by Mr. Neve himself preamp.

OP, all of these neve plug-ins offer something slightly different, I'd definitely recommend demoing a bunch and trying the one you like most. Who knows, your favourite might be one of the ones that is hated. I used the Lindell 80 for a while and liked it, and at the time it seemed really highly regarded, now all I read are people saying it's terrible and to avoid it.

 

What you pay for a Neve or a Neumann is not (only) the sound quality, but the reliability of the unit. In fact, I'm tired of people buying Neumanns as if that's the key to vocal heaven. Why are you under the impression that every professional has some gear in the studio because it has some magical sound that can't be achieved ITB? It really just takes a few searches to see how many top industry professionals with tons of gear in the studio are using plugin emulations of gear they have total access to.

Of course, analog (still) sounds better, but only if you're putting it in isolation against a plugin. And these days, you'd be impressed by how many people would just pick the plugin in a blind test. I still think it's a very weird take to pretend analog is such a magical device when all of its behavior can be accurately measured and replicated with math. Once GPUs start processing audio, analog will die a very painful death.

At this point in the discussion, I would be more than happy to see raw and analog processed tracks posted here.

 

AI will kill outboard high-end analog gear like we heard digital plugins would kill it. We heard this about digital synths. We heard it about Linux for Audio. Cars with internal combustion engines. The market will definitely change, and you will always see it at the low end consumer and prosumer grade stuff. But there are some things there will always be a market for.

The tiring part of threads of the same motif is that they are off-topic. Owning a Neve doesn't make you an expert on plugin emulations of one. Quite the contrary, unless you are the kind of person who buys a Neve 1073 so you finally have a chance to methodically/scientifically compare emulations against it, instead of using it for what you paid top dollar for.

Why would you use a plugin if you already had one? And why would you ask about plugins if you had the money to buy one? You'd just go buy one.

The only new twist to this one, is that we actually have people recommending stuff they have never even owned.

 

Analog is becoming digital; some artists have closed their studios and are now doing everything digitally. There are different types of musicians: beginners, semi-professionals, and professionals! There are very talented and less talented musicians. I predict that in 10 to 20 years, almost everything will be digitak.

The future musicians who aren't born yet will grow up surrounded by an abundance of digital and AI software. When people talk about Neve, etc., it's as if we're talking about the invention of the radio. All of that was a long time ago. Now is the transition from analog to the digital age.

Of course, everyone can do what works and what seems useful to them. You should always tell beginners the truth and also consider that income or available money is unfortunately unequally distributed. Purely mathematically, digital is cheaper. If you become famous and thus rich, you'll have a qualified team of sound engineers at your disposal.

In the end, only quality that is also affordable will prevail; everything else disappears from the market.

 

Equilibrium will definitely do great job on the EQ, however it has absolutely no harmonics and this is the main quality of a 1073, the curves can be done with any decent parametric, there is very little magic in EQ curves even of different types, a lot of the mojo of certain EQ's is in the output line amp. a Neve 1073 consists of a mic pre & EQ, there are 3 transformers and 3 Class A gain stages contributing to its sound. There was no seperate Neve 1073 Mic pre or EQ.

 

Indeed it's all nonsense and doesn't matter.

People just (want to) make a thing out of some completely UNmusical harmonics without any evidence, but fact is:
https://journals.lww.com/otology-ne...tion_of_the_harmonic_series_influences.4.aspx

Quote: "Harmonic series reduction increases music enjoyment in CI and NH individuals with or without CI simulation. Therefore, minimization of the harmonics may be a useful strategy for enhancing musical enjoyment among both NH and CI listeners."

Or this:
https://archimago.blogspot.com/2020/05/blind-test-results-part-i-is-high.html
https://archimago.blogspot.com/2020/06/blind-test-results-part-ii-is-high.html
https://archimago.blogspot.com/2020/06/blind-test-results-part-iii-is-high.html
Mojo is exactly what the term already indicates - mumbojumbo nonsense.


Therefore one should just buy dbx 530 or the midas eq if he wants this kind of workflow and does not have a lot of money. For a preamp or dac/adc just check the data and the amount of distortion. Everything else just technically doesn't make any sense.

 

Last edited: May 30, 2025 at 12:03 AM

Let's assume that is true (I'm inclined to think it is, so we're in agreement, actually): Don't you see the inherent problem that you cannot apply math (read: DSP) to an analog signal? So it must first be digitized, yes? And how is a vocal signal best digitized?

You have to convert a mechanical wave to an electronic analog, and then boost that faint mic-level signal to line level and feed to an ADC.

So how do you model away limitations which occur before digitization?

I find the idea of pre-amp modelling suspect, as by the time you're in a position to apply pre-amp modelling, the signal no longer needs pre-amplification.

 

If we follow the regular analog chain, preamp modelling makes no sense, and I don't think anyone is really trying to sell that. In fact, I think so many people limit themselves at placing a preamp emulation at the start of a chain when it is, in fact, just saturation. The thing is, there are way too many analog devices that decouple saturation from amplification these days, because technology already got to the point where we can have crystal clear gain without the downside of coloring the signal in places you do not want it.

On the topic of modelling a preamp, an electronic component is basically analog code. The behavior is predictable and measurable. There are multiple lab equipment that can accurately tell you what a preamp is doing and how it scales mathematically. We have the added bonus that current technology is so clean of noise that you can accurately measure equipment without coloring the results.

The issue with analog emulations is that the math is very complex and it falls into two issues: the lack of time for a company trying to make a profit, and CPU cycles. The more complex an unit gets, the more complex the math, the more time and processing it takes to happen. Like I said above (and it might have gotten misunderstood as AI), once we have plugins running on the GPU instead of the CPU, we will have extremely accurate results since a midrange GPU cycle can be 10x plus faster than a high end CPU. What holds us back is not a lack of understanding of how electronics work, it is the fact that there are no CPU cycles in real life. As tech evolves, the gap closes. I personally think TBTECH DeepVintage is already very close at closing that gap while remaining performant.

 

The only thing matters to me is the sound. let me ask you a question... do you accept DMG TrackComp as an authentic replicate of hardware counterpart?

 

I'm having a hard time following your train of thought that analog hardware can be replaced by DSP in the context of "Neve 1073 for vocals."

How do you replace a Neumann and a Neve 1073 with DSP when you're hitting your converters with a Shure SM57 and a Mackie pre?

 

If you are looking for the EQ curve of the microphone, that's very easy. If you're looking for the saturation and character of a 73, that is possible to replicate with math, especially since modern preamps are clean across the entire frequency spectrum. Modern preamps have no sound.

Even if you place the DSP mimicking an analog chain, your converters didn't alter the sound in any way for it to make the DSP less accurate. You're just essentially decoupling the amplification from the saturation, something that already exists in analog for over a decade.

 

Your argument seems hinged on using microphones and preamps which are 100% flat and containing zero character, and that the DSP pre-amp is designed to not *actually* model the amplification stage, but only the other elements.

I'm not sure these conditions match the given scenario.

 

Odd fallacy you present as it's more akin to someone wanting to drive a Ferrari down the PCH but everyone tells them to just buy a VR headset and enjoy the ride. It's not the same, no matter what anyone posts.

The simple FACT is if you want your audio to actually have what a vintage Neve provides you either buy a pair for almost 10K serviced, rent a pair if you can find them for $100 a day, borrow a pair from a friend if you are lucky, or spend $20-50 a month at Access Analog. I'm an Access Analog customer, nothing more... they just provide the single most cost effective way to use many hardware devices for the average person.

No plugin today does what a vintage Neve does, again fact. Nebula is the closest but ripple and digital aliasing are always an issue. Algo plugins lack actual analog harmonic distortion. Unfortunately no digital Algo, IR, or AI modeling based plugin can do what real tubes or transformers do to audio. I look forward to the day they nail hardware in digital, until that day I'll use both.

We can all debate if analog is worth the cost and effort, that's all opinion and I personally love digital for its strengths, and enjoy analog for what it brings to sterile digital files. It's funny to read so many posts here listing all these plugins attempting to mimic a vintage Neve when today we ALL have access to them so cheap online.

If a vintage Neve was not special nobody would spend so much effort attempting to mimic them. SO if you want a vintage Neve sound use the hardware, if you want to use a plugin use Fabfilter, UAD, or Waves. Different tools for different jobs, it's all about using the best tool for the job at hand.

As always, to each their own tools.

 

Last edited: May 29, 2025 at 10:51 PM

IMHO Tim P's Blue EQ is the closest Neve EQ ITB at normal levels in all the tests over the years I've done. You can't drive it like hardware but it gets you about 90-93% there, good for some while others want more. I still use Blue EQ many time in mixing when needed but Fabfilter or Equilbeilum get used just as much depending on the task.

I enjoyed my pair of Heritage 73Jr EQ's, they are up there with BAE in a modern Neve tone and well worth the cost IMHO.

 

Last edited: May 29, 2025 at 8:32 PM

THISSSSSS i'd be down

 

Fact. I made this rap beat >> in a single day over an Internet Money loop (cxdy and frankie) completely itb, tell me it doesn't sound warm and "analog" (i used mostly FabFilter and Nebula/Acquas ftr)
https://www.orrintonbeats.com/beat/buried-alive-mix-a-instrumental--22752851

Internet Money’s Melody sample - my chain



-AlexB SSL G Buss Compressor 96 kHz 3ms Atk 0.6s Rel (Patchwork)

-AlexB SSL G Buss Line Out 96 kHz (patchwork)

-Pro-Q4 with some shelving

-Plugin Alliance SPL BiG

-Logic Pro Direction Mixer

-Tim Petherick Vintage Gyrator eq 48 kHz High Shelf for air

-Tim Petherick Vintage Gyrator Preamp 48 kHz (no patchwork)

-Pro-Q4 LP with a low-pass filter for hypersonic filtering



Getting sent to parallel chain A

-Acustica Midnight 96 kHz for 670 holding it down, adding warmth and punch to the melodies (patchwork)

-Native Instruments Dirt Vocal Warmer Preset, 44% mix, for low mids sauce and harmonics (patchwork)

Also getting sent to parallel chain B:

-Tim Petherick Opto 1b Compressor Fixed-Mode 96 kHz (Patchwork)

-Tim Petherick Opto 1b Preamp 96 kHz (Patchwork)

-Waves CLA-76 for control (a little aliasing is fine!! Esp. in parallel)

-StandardCLIP for peak-taming



my DRUMSBASS stack chain



-Jaycen Joshua 8NLS Buss Trick

-Cradle Orion using my custom preset, Drive section DISABLED but everything else is in use



Getting sent to parallel chain A (670) mentioned earlier, but lower send volume

Also getting sent to parallel chain B (1b into 1176) mentioned earlier

(P.S. try AlexB VAX Legacy on trap bass, you won’t be disappointed)



my master chain



-Cradle God Particle

-Cupwise Ax102 Tape Machine 96 kHz

-AlexB 4k Console AI 96 kHz G.Bus API Setting

-Plugin Alliance LTL Silver Bullet mk2 (preset below if u wanna download it)

As to Will's point, digital does have some massive advantages. I can have a sound closely resembling that of huge analog gear, with nothing but a laptop and headphones.

 

Last edited: May 29, 2025 at 9:37 PM

Working on it! I'm having a hard time installing few emulations! i'll try my best tomorrow to install those few emulations and post the results here, otherwise i will post without those few and add more emulations later.

Also, For more fun, Do you guys want to do blind test first to guess which is which or should I post the results directly?

 

I think what he meant is if an audio file is provided and everyone can take it and add their own "take" on what a 1073 should deliver when an audio example is passed through it. maybe people who give it a try can provide soft and hard versions. I'll for sure be using the Cupwise Tone Vol.2 and TBTECH deep 73. Maybe i'll try some others too for fun we'll see. But i hope someone can provide an audio file that would be usable for this kind of test!!