Sorry for the dumb title, but hear me out. I'm genuinely curious.

There are plugins that are sometimes 10+ years old that sound as good if not better than more recent counterparts. Many people still swear by some old Waves plugins (I never cared for them myself, but then again I haven't won a grammy and been quoted by every plugin maker on their website saying "this new plugin replaced all my other plugins because I already spent the money I made shilling for the other guys!")
How many "110% analog warmth let your mix breathe and make you cum in your pants!1!1" have come out in the last 3 years that sound nowhere near as Decapitator or UBK-1? And remember these plugins were built for much slower CPUs.

From a technical point, what did these guys did so good that years later their work still hold up? Are they DSP geniuses? I don't doubt they are, but with the CPU power we have today, wouldn't logic dictate that a new Decapitator that sounds a LOT better should've been developed?

Or is it simply the fact that, even though there ARE better sounding alternatives, a plugin like Decapitator does what it's supposed to do so well, and so fast, that in many cases it's just not worth using something more advanced like, say, SDRR2 in its place?

Or am I just an ignorant fool?

Thx.

 

I agree I've used decapitator, they can do better algo now, maybe with oversampling to avoid aliasing at lower sample rate, for me these plugins are not bad and good now, just a little bit old for somes. I've got all plugins for 99$ at a big discount some years ago so good price by the way

 

Good maths is good maths forever. Or something.

 

In the beginning the earth was empty - today the world is full.

No matter what you take on hand or what things you use. One can always ask who invented it? 200 years ago there was no electricity. Today we use electricity every day - most of us take it for granted. Only when the power fails do we know what we are missing.

On the quality of audio plugins: Complex thing, first the idea - then money as a loan from the bank - then hire staff. I think it's always people who set something up themselves, so-called doers. Someone can do something very well and they love what they do, with a little luck and inspiration they sometimes turn into a company. Sometimes they go broke too. They create a lot of know-how, sometimes they manage to solve a problem and they give us better plugins. I think progress is what drives people to new things. We are always evolving. The key lies in the brain or with God - nobody really knows.

 

PSP e27 came out in 2016, still among the best. A beast in MS mode.
Several AlexB Nebula libraries are very old, but still at the top today.

 

They were designed and tuned by people with good ears.

 

https://audient.com/technology/mic-pre-technology/

 

If a plugin makes your music sound good then that's all that matters, regardless of it's age. There are studios around the world still using hardware dating back to the 1960s.

 

Interesting question. As with many other things, it depends on 4 things: the idea, theoretical knowledge, practical skills and taste.
Technically, there are no great innovations. There are some practices that are used more often nowadays (due to the higher computing power), but these practices are not new.

What actually makes a plugin good? UI design? Sound? Presets? The amount of editable parameters? Performance efficiency?

I would say it's the balance of these aspects. But the most important aspects for a good sounding result is knowledge and a tasteful choice! So if a plugin doesn't sound good, it's either the skill level of the programmer or his taste. Or it's your skill level and your taste, but that's another story ;)

 

I'm no expert but I still use plugins older than dirt itself. Some things are just good forever so I wouldn't worry about the age of something.

I just look at them like tools that are out in the real world. Some producers still swear on old outboard gear so the date doesn't matter to me when it comes to plugins either. It's just a music tool.

 

Decapitator is the single most overrated plugin on the market. It sounds awful. It sounds like wet farts. Maybe people just don’t know what good saturation sounds like. I think everyone loves Decapitator because everyone else loves it. You can do so much better these days.

 

Had to go look to recall, but much of it is likely due to the head guy having worked as a developer at Eventide for years. (H3000, etc)

 

Just as there are very good writers and extraordinary film directors and very few people invent something new,
so there are these extraordinary people in the software industry like FabFilter - Waves - BrainWorx and some others!

 

It's more the fact that the likelihood of a killer app plugin to appear out of nowhere is quite low so we had quite the time to use those who already got released

Well Renaissance bundle is still great but even a lot of the old waves stuff is total garbage that's the catch here

Oh Cmon why would you take advertisement language serious to begin with

ploytec mango, DMG Trackcomp 2 or as you mentioned SDRR for example, there are tons of good recent plugins they just don't get the advertisement they deserve
Also "slow CPU" is relative, there is Moore's Law for example

Yep, they are good coders "geniuses" as you call them. And who said that Decapitator didn't get any updates in the past decade? Ever thought of that?

There is simply no need to develop another Decapitator, plugin developers know that (ok there are like a gorillian 1176 emus but thats another topic)

SDRR is not advanced just cause it's a newer plugin, there are tons of unusable trash plugins that are new but by no standard advanced
There are cases where the Klanghelm plugin sounds better than the Soundtoys one and vice versa, but in most cases it won't make an audible difference for the end-consumer, often times plugins (good, renowned ones) are like DAWs, capable of achieving p much everything

You also have to consider the fact that if you know a plugin for 10 years you will most likely not swap it out if there is no reason to do so - and no, creativity and experimentation can be used as argument to do so maybe but if you'd apply that to every aspect of your music making process then you'd never get to do the actual music, I think the professionals are rather conservative with their plugin habits than your average piracy user

 

Some that comes to mind when talking about old plug-ins that still sound good, and that I still use, are some of the Stillwell plug-ins, Sonalksis, Variety of Sound, the IK Multimedia Classic plug-ins, many of the U-he plug-ins are getting quite old, Cytomic The Glue and so on. The oldest ones I have saved are probably the VB-Audio stuff that was released back in December (written in BASIC haha). I think they are from the beginning of 2000

A lot of plug-ins released today are still using the same principles and code as plug-ins released 10-12 years ago. The one thing that has really changed since back then is all of the AI assisted plug-ins that we have today. Heavy oversampling filters were not as common back then either.