Have never gotten a sound with SmartEQ that wound up staying on the track. Neutron, the same. Just did not like the sound of those. But Sonible Balancer, it kind of never fails. It gets used on a lot of mixes.
Pro-Q is on literally every master. It lives at the top of the chain. It's the go-to problem solver. It's not really there to "sound good". It's a utility, and it feeds into another EQ, something simple with knobs and a great tone. This combination is the game-changer.
Pro-Q is perhaps the single most useful plugin there is, outside of the DMG stuff, which is really too well-featured to be useful. Zero latency does sound like crap. Linear phase, all modes, really do not like the sound. In natural phase, pro-q sounds good to me.
The way I use pro-q, these others don't even make it in the door. Probably half the moves I'm making are dynamic, surgical moves. It's really precise tone-shaping, it's working with dynamics, it's having a place to go and do cuts before the next eq, which will be a tone eq with knobs.
Nova can technically do this, but the interface is really fiddly compared to how Pro-q works. It's not the "looks". It's the workflow. To understand the real value of pro-q, you have to do things with it no other plug-in really does. It always sounds better than bypass.

 

Why Sonible is not as popular as other eq's? Because most professionals would never rely on AI.

 

I read your affirmation, now I demand proof.

 

This is trolling, even if unintentional.
It eats time and energy better spent elsewhere.

And I am sure I have now missed some kind of interesting porn somewhere.

 

“Sound Quality is a perceptual reaction to the sound of a product that reflects the listener's reaction to how acceptable the sound of that product is: the more acceptable, the greater the SQ.”
'Sound quality' in reproduction is an intuitive quality. Roughly it includes subjective impression of presence of detail, precision, clarity and distinctiveness, and lack of artefacts, or in other words, the absence of the opposite.
Practically, acceptability is based on degree of similarity of the reproduced sound to the original sound of some sound source. That similarity is an objective relation [in many aspects, it can be measured].
Since any DSP processing includes distortion, the amount of blurring of sound that it produces (that can be heard) is the basis of subjective evaluation.
So in general, the judgement of sound quality depends on one's hearing abilities, listening experience and the quality of reproducing gear.
Our impression of sound quality is crucial to our ability to enjoy the sound. So it does matter to everybody, no matter if they accept the fact or not.
Many people don't care about sound quality. It is quite legitimate, unless they accuse people who care for it for mysticism, being naive or even being ignorant or stupid.

 

EXACTLY

 

Cuz it is all about sales and marketing strategies that help companies penetrate the target market.

The same thing applies to Pro Tools.

Pro Tools is the most popular DAW not because of being the best DAW, but sales and marketing strategies.

 

Last edited: Aug 28, 2022

You are probably heavily influenced by cognitive bias in that case. If you can practically cancel out two different digital EQ's with each other the difference between the two is too small for human ears to distinguish, no matter what you think you can hear.

The difference you can hear between digital EQs are mostly in default filter shapes, gain/Q interaction and cramping etc. Pro-Q 3 doesn't measure Q the same way as many other EQs, so you have to take in regard that a Q-value of 1.00 in Pro-Q is the same as a Q-value of 0.71 (1.89 in Prime and Gliss EQ) in most other digital EQs. Some digital EQs (SSL, Waves, Brainworx etc) don't even show you the correct values and therefore is trying to trick you into believing that their EQ sounds different and "better" than others.

Try loading up Pro-Q 3 and Prime-EQ again on two different tracks, send a static white noise signal to both EQs and make a 12dB boost at 1kHz in both EQs. Set Q to 1.00 in Pro-Q and to 1.89 in Prime-EQ. Now flip the phase on one of the tracks. Everything will go silent down to -90dB. This difference is tiny enough that I doubt even dogs could make out the difference, and certainly not humans.

 

,

Seriously, to me, the best way to compare is a double blind-test with at the very least 7/10 hits.

 

I could upload the same comparison with Smart EQ (2) and you wouldn't be able to detect the cuts either.
However there're two things to consider when comparing Smart EQ (2) to FF Pro-Q3. Smart EQ is linear phase only and at least v2 is changing the gain and slope pretty much below 200Hz.

This

OTOH, is a good and valid question.

 

Crap. I ran out of popcorn. Hold my "I know what I'm talking about but can't scientifically proove it"-beer while I get some more popcorn.

 

And people still think "Pro" stands for "professional" when it actually is "production".

 

because it's not cracked on Mac,
nobody cares about plugins which use annoying protection bullshit, and non-functional free trials,
Fabfilter is popular because it doesn't annoy people with iLok, offers free NFR licenses for legacy products, keeps providing support for legacy plugins (have old Pro-Q? you still get native M1 support)

 

Frankly speaking, I thought that it was "professional" until recently.

 

That's interesting, when i read the title of the thread, "Crave EQ" was the first EQ that came to mind, even before i opened the thread and read the post.
While i disagree with the premise that there is a "best" EQ, i definitely agree that Crave EQ is oddly underrated considering its quality. I think it probably comes down to marketing resources

 

Now I'm curious, let's see what the Crave is all about.... Oh I am surprised..: I just copied it once...!

Crave DSP was founded by Keith Wood, a programmer, physicist and digital audio fanatic based in the UK. As an 80s child, I grew up during the home computer revolution and experimented with digital audio from an early age. My first computer had an 8-bit processor with a clock speed of 2MHz and 32K RAM. The only way to make music on it was to roll your own code to generate sound and sequence notes.

I loved it, and I’ve been writing code to make music ever since. Along the way I got a master’s degree in mathematical physics which helped me develop the skills to create new and interesting models for sound.

Learning and improvement are central to my philosophy. I am a scientist and software engineer, not a professional musician, mixing engineer, mastering engineer or composer, and welcome feedback on what I can do to make using my software easier and more enjoyable for audio professionals and hobbyists alike.

Source: https://cravedsp.com/about and read the Blog: https://cravedsp.com/blog

 

do you hear something we can't?
how can you differenciate digital EQs with the same exact response?
They literally cancel each other out if you did your tests precisely
FabFilter beats other EQs with its ergonomics (not aesthetics), options, and CPU usage

 

Last edited: Aug 28, 2022

The developer website does not make me want to buy this plugin. If I know about your plugin, track down your website, and I want to purchase it less than when I got to your site; it is not selling your product.

 

So a novice might read this and then ask himself: "then why the fuck is everybody trying to emulate vintage gear, which was full of imperfections?"

 

...and the answer is that the computers made audio production accessible to literally anyone. companies that sold plugins to thousands of studios realized the potential to send to millions of people which business wise is once-in-a-lifetime insane opportunity. How do you market to novices? Promising the experience of the most capable hardware inside a computer. And, as anything people do, the affairs started to spiral down to the point we now people argue on what eq sounds best. They forgot to make music, they just collect specs. They forgot to use their ears, so they overanalyze what the plugins do at -120 dB (well under the noisefloor).

At this point we have a bunch of complete parallel worlds (that overlap for the simple fact that they all use a daw and some plugins) and we should probably come up with some terminology because it arises confusion:

We have the music producers and songwriters world - which just make music and give zero fucks about the tools. The amount of Grammy winning music made with fruity loops and waves is insane. Or jazz & classical records & movies made with protools stock for that matter.

Then we have audio enthusiats, sample and plugin collectors - they just compare specs, complain that that plugin sucks (stop using it ffs!) and at best they make amateur little sketches and never finish any songs because "they still don't have the best plugins for their great musical ideas"

Then we have the audio tutorials & sample/presets packs market - this one keeps the audio enthusiasts (mentioned above) busy. They "learn" continuously but they actually learn nothing. They get their daily "fix" revolting on youtube videos, downloading plugins and samples and presets. The problem is that this audio tutorials market is mainly made by people incapable of making music continuosly (because is fucking hard) so they imprint their loser mentality to the audio enthusiasts and these ones clog the audio forums that once were for musicians.

If you wonder why I am here, I have time to lose between song exports