I still LOVE and use Nebula to this day, the recent GS post by AA CEO Giancarlo that AA will no longer be updating Nebula and thus abandoning the massive 15 years of Nebula libraries, is super sad but on par with recent AA moves. Loosing Nebula hurts but the new IR tech coming looks promising. I have a very long hate AA the company but love the AA tech policy, but today I only use a few Acqua's because they have a hifi sound to them all built in, I've sold most of my Acqua's, will be selling a few more soon but I'm loving the Fire series as they work well and sound good with low CPU usage.

I'll be making some Proteus IR's myself soon and If the results are good that will be my next move.... and I also went back to UAD for some needs.

 

What’s clunky about it? They work pretty good in my opinion. When I tried them on my old laptop a few years ago it was a nightmare but now even on the new M1 MacBook Air, I’m able to run many instances of their plugins.

 

You can say the same thing about people with hundreds of thousands of dollars of analogue gear making shitty music as well. It doesn’t really prove any point. I’ve seen dudes spend 10K on a guitar to just play power chords and spend another 10K on vintage heads and cabinets to play and record crappy covers. Does that mean vintage heads and cabinets are magic fairy dust that is useless simply because there are some people that have no idea how to use them?? I don’t think so man

 

Every company has its pros and cons. Many old costumers from UAD are pissed off about the whole native plug-in subscription that they are now pulling off. I think at the end of the day, everyone has different tools that fit their workflows.

 

making shitty music and don't even understand music is different I guess. You are putting words into my mouth here, I didn't say all those vintages are bad. I said, polished, glowing etc there, it means those things work.

my point is that, people (in GS) that sing high praises for AA are mostly like that, priority isn't in order. Focusing on the details but completely ignored the fundamentals.

 

I guess different people want different things from an EQ? When I want to surgically cut something fab filter is a great tool. But what if I want to use rupert neves Q curves and target the specific frequencies he designed in his old gear? Then it makes sense to use a tool like Gold 5 which emulates that pretty well.
People swear by the Pultec UAD plug-in which remained untouchable until the Acustica version Purple gained more attention. Lots of blind tests and shoot outs preferred Purple over UAD while some still liked the UAD sound.
Not saying one is better than the other as it really comes down to taste.

 

I did my extensive testing, compared to Pro Q3 and MasterQ2, but Cherry has something extremely pleasant going on with clean cuts and boosting in the low end. Transients are extremely well preserved when they fall apart with other EQs... Very program dependant and the devil is the extreme details. Probably not worth it for everyone, but I sure enjoy the difference.
Hate giving my money to AA but might will at the end of the trial.

Ear fatigue might also play a role, so be careful before jumping to conclusions.

I also agree that they are MASTERS at selling placebo !!
But sometimes, some products are worth it to look into.

UAD still rules for me for all compression, saturation and effects

 

I totally agree with your statement.

If AA would have developed a proprietary hardware (like the UAD Shark cards) that let their plugin be used on a project without the serious CPU hit and in realtime, I guess I would have just stopped paying attention to the cult part of it and kept on buying their plugins. But they didn't and all that was left after the puzzle of inserting one of their plugin in a project was that bitter taste of the group and the hefty price i paid to use an inefficient plugin.

They do sound good though. That I must admit. It's just all the rest that makes it useless.

The owner acting like an upscale ostrich with his head in the sand also doesn't help.

 

I agree with what you’ve said as well about them selling placebo. They’re very good at it - and you’re totally right about the community too.
I only own 2 plugins by Acustica as I bought them specifically for something I needed in my workflow. Gold 5 gives me a suite of vintage Neve stuff to push and distort while also being very transparent and clean if I want them to. I also got Lemon which is an interesting delay unit that I think sounds pretty unique and still remains a must have in my workflow.

 

What's interesting to see is that Paul Third has stopped using Aquas, but still uses Nebula in his workflow. Last year he said he could match a Vari-Mu hardware with Magenta5 Comp and sticks by it. What's weird though is that his tastes in what plugins he uses change so much, which doesn't go down well if you're contradicting yourself from only a year ago saying you're now a UAD person and no longer AA for unexplained reasons.

Azzimov has made some awesome demos on his YT channel with just Nebula programs, and does before and after comparisons. When people say no pros use AA stuff to me that doesn't matter, as I have my tastes and they might not match up. AA plugs require a lot of computer know-how, so you're average producer is going to be put off with no idea how to manage CPU, RAM, and HD space. If you want a dedicated card for AA just buy a crazy powerful computer with all your AA plugs on it and run Audio Gridder. Problem solved.

If your business model is to please clients and keep the status quo with music tastes, and just use Waves plugins and all that, be my guest. If an AA plugin sounds good to your ears a year from now then just use it, as it's clearly stood the test of time.

 

I always find funny how people complain about traffic.

Just buy an helicopter and call it a day.

People that doesn't know how to fly an helicopter is so disingenuous as it always beat the traffic since it was invented.

Problem solved.

- signed, Ding dong.

 

A jetpack would be better

 

As i said on another post, i only use Nebula/Acqua as "spice" on my master bus.
Some console stuff mainly.

That's all.

I was an early user, with Nebula 1 and all the mess (profiles and such) to make it work.
When i seen it was still a mess ... i gone away.

BUT i still pretend Nebula/Acqua saturation is still top notch.
Proteus is coming anyway
And even profiler like NAM can do it too, very close.

It is the same in guitar domain : profilers (Kemper, NAM, ToneX, THU Rig player, QC ...) do a better job sound wise than ANY algo software.
Because when you code, you need to know what you need to code BEFORE coding it.
Whereas profiler don"t care about WHY : it just capture the FACTS.

A lot more effective.
You don't have to code hundreds amps : just code ONE profiler and you can profile ANY amp.

 

A big component of making music is the ability to have a vision. And by vision I don't mean some grandiose philosophical sense, I simply mean the ability to discern the current state of your track/mix and the ability to envision how the end result should sound. When you know these two components, you know what you have to do to achieve that and the process reveals itself when a vision exists.

The moment someone tells me that "a plug-in sounds good" that means they have no vision. They're the kind of people relying on a plugin to deliver a "better" sound - yes, it could very well be better, but better than mediocre is not sensational, it just sucks a bit less.

I've met mastering people that delivered mindblowing masters with digital plugins and their email was "here is the master". And then other people that delivered quite underwhelming works and the email was something like "so I uses an SSL to beef this and that fancy analog compressor to add some transformer thickness and then the red tape to smooth out the high end" only to deliver a mediocre output.

If you give me just pulltecs, I will use as many as needed to achieve what I want. If you give me just Pro-Q, I will use it so I get what I want. This is where the "use your ears" gets coupled with having a vision.

"Waves" (aka generally working in the box) was good enough already during that transitional decade after 2000s when the music was still mixed on consoles and in the box aswell - artists themselves were unable to discern if the mix was done ITB or OTB

The sole issue in all of the above - if you don't have vision, you can't understand what I'm talking about because you have no point of reference. Just don't put "elevate taste" and "Acustica" in the same sentence, there's nothing tasty about it, except for a toast CPU.

 

Someone’s a bit salty about Acustica lol.
The whole thing about someone saying that a plug-in sounds good equals no vision is a huge reeeeach lol.

 

Britney Spears couldn't discern an ITB mix vs OTB?

 

Last edited: Aug 8, 2023

Artists don't know sh*t about sound quality.
I've seen well known guitarists not event knowing what string gauge they play ... because their guitar tech change them

Same with listeners : success was NEVER "good sounding record"
Even if it helps. Because most listeners don't care (and know sh*t too).

"Master of puppets" is one of the most well known metal album of all time.
Now tell me were is the bass

I don't even speak about ppl pretending being "producers" ...

When ppl can't hear the difference between Waves plugins from the 90's and the last profiling software, it is time to stop arguing and going back to do something constructive

I've spend too many time already with deaf ppl pretending having golden ears.
So go mix with your 90's plugins.

Yes it is enough ... like it was in the 90's

 

it's not their job/role to play in the whole collaboration effort. compartmentalization (not sure it's the right word, I mean, separating tasks) proven to be the best way to push everything to the limit. people only do what they are good at and leave it to the next person to do their part to take things up a level. do all legendary producers know how to write legendary epic riff/melody ? I don't think so, it's not their role/job anyway. all the best musicians in the world put together with the best producers in the world won't create anything good without a good, experienced A&R/project manager that knows what will work best with what. everyone has a role to play and is equally as important.

 

t. mister spurnedlover

 

I recently used the SP79 nebula library from Alex B as a mix summing option and the result really improved the final mix.
As bitter as I am from the inefficient technology that they provide, I really wish they had the budget or at least the vision to bring it to the masses with some sort of hardware to process their needs. That whole ''buy yourself a 4000$ server to compute their AA needs'' is retarded at best. For 1K$ I can get something very similar on the UA side and I'd buy myself a 15K$ SP79 console before investing 4K$ only to compute an emulation. The only way I can see myself using them efficiently would be to switch it all to Reaper which I find clunky and uninspiring. That is not going to happen anytime soon.