Black is an Acqua plugin bundle that includes two free players focused on gain-staging. But the secret behind Black is the accompanying preamp emulations that provide the authentic analog console sound. The additional 'Volumes,' including modern, vintage, discontinued, custom, or existing hardware emulations, can be purchased separately. You'll enjoy going through all these emulations with Black, The Authentic Analog Sound recreation!

https://www.acustica-audio.com/store/t/acqua/tools/black

 

I'm not familiar with Acustica stuff, but seeing as it got some hype on BPB I decided to get this.

First: you need an Acustica account (boo, hiss), then you need to get their downloader/manager (again), and then... well, it's still downloading slowly as it's a whopping 1GB in size and I'm assuming that's compressed.

<soapbox>Surely that's ludicrous for a channel strip/saturator? I mean what does exactly eat up that amount of space. Yeah I can spare that but it doesn't exactly give me confidence in the company's other products</soapbox>

 

Think about Acustica Volterra Kernel tech like a "3D Impulse Response", capturing non linear response.
It can even capture transformer sag, saturation ...

So YES, it needs to be huge (especially at 96 kHz).
Their servers are weak because they are not "mainstream" : only few ppl use Acustica plugins.

It is more a "passionate / artisan / boutique ..." spirit

When i tried their mechanical reverbs, consoles et OwnHammer Nebula cabs ... i was STUNNED
NOTHING on this planet sounds like it, apart the real thing

It is up to everyone to consider if SOUND BLISS is worth it to them
To me, it is AND by a large margin

 

Yes, it sucks that you need to download it through their Aquarius software and their servers always seem very slow.

Well, with the method they use to sample the hardware it's not that ludicruos, even though it could probably be a bit smaller in size.

I didn't get the hype about Acustica at first either, and I still think that some people exagerrate when talking about the quality of their products, but their technique for sampling hardware do sound very good in comparison to a lot of algorithmic analog modeled plug-ins. Acustica themselves don't make the best use of their sampling engine though, it seems most people agree that a bunch of creators of third party libraries (Tim Petherick, AlexB, Cupwise and Analog In The Box i.e) for Acustica's Nebula software takes the price. I don't own Nebula yet, so I can't say anything about that.

Read up a bit about Nebula and the Volterra kernel technique of capturing impulse responses of non-linear systems. It's quite interesting and very different from what all other plug-in developers are doing and it definitely has it's place within the world of pro-audio!

 

I can confirm that, especially about AlexB and Cupwise libraries.
Acustica has good and so, so plugins.
Some of the best AA plugins are Pink, Opal, Water, Viridian, Cream, Navy, Crimson, Blond and Snow.

 

For Black, they actually sampled 8 to 16 inputs, separately, on each console. You can select the individually sampled line or mic preamp input in the plugin. To get the full benefit, you need to put a separate instance of Black on each stem, then select a different line or mic preamp input for each instance.

This is often the criticism of Harrison Mixbus... it claims it emulates gain staging of the console, but it doesn't emulate the preamps... you can bounce a track through it and do a null test and find it nulls completely.