Anyone tried the Nomad Factory BBE "sweet" of plugins? Thoughts?

http://www.nomadfactory.com/products/bbe_sonicsweet_optimized/index.html

 

i did but they are not essential, if you use them you have to be careful with adding to much low end to your mix, i prefer pro eq over these in M/S mode

 

They're great for what they do, especially the harmonic enhancer (blue one). However, that kind of plugins shouldn't be used everywhere on your mixes...

 

Didn't have BBE their own official plugins?

Anyway, anyone I know talks about how they used BBE and liked it at the start, but later down the line all had an 'epiphany' of thinking 'ahh it is actually kinda awful and not the way to do things' and never looked back.

Doesn't mean you can't try them, and like them.. but most pro's walk away from them, that's all I know.

 

I have the actual BBE plugs. The stomps are pretty great, but the Maximizer sounds real plastic-y to me (as I assume the real hardware unit does). I've used it on a couple of tracks, usually on bass guitar, but the EQ curve is the ol' "inverted bell" that bumps up the low end and high end and squashes down the mid-range like a shitty boom box with a cheap graphic EQ, which I think is where the "plastic" sound comes from. I'd rather leave that kind of tweaking to the end user, most of whom probably have their music player EQ set that way, anyway.

 

Concensus when I asked about the maximizer is that it's not a good idea to use it in mixes. It's use is to align the time when the high end and low end hits your ears because high frequency sound travels faster than low frequency sound. At least that's the way it was advertised. So there's some kind of phase/delay adjustment in the bands. It would be very specific to the system it was adjusted on, where the listener was, etc. Works great for live work, but don't know about mixing with it because of the ease of creating phase problems.
I've got the actual hardware so may try running through it just to see if there's some transformer sheen, but think I'd have heard about that by now. Who knows, maybe I've got the "magical" one that just makes everything sound good!

 

I had the hardware BBE Sonic Maximizer and clients jaws would drop. Then they got the mix home and they were on the phone asking why it didn't sound as good at home as the studio. So simple answer, don't trust anything that offers an amazing listening experience with two knobs.