Plamen by Soundevice Digital

Sculpture your saturation

The difference between dull and exciting can sometimes be just saturation. But not just its amount but also its character. We believe every frequency band deserves different treatment, and that's why we created Plamen. This flexible multi-band saturator can add a different kind and amount of saturation to each band, resulting in a balanced tone, and it can even make it in parallel!



introductory discount - 19€ only

 

Since linking to my comment at AZ is not allowed, I'll just paste it here:

Technical observations:
- Analog/Linear Phase changes the harmonic content and the slope of the bands!
- The bands have an upper and lower freq limit! 80, 80-400, 400-2500 & 2500-10000Hz.
- You can't switch Solo from one band to another because when one Solo is active the others are greyed out!
- No bypass for the bands!!!
- Gain boost and attentuation have different impact on the band's level and the rest of the freqs (mostly adjacent but not only).
- Clip seems to be some sort of strange asymetric soft-clipping.
- Although nowhere mentioned in the manual, Plamen seems to be calibrated to 0VU = -18dBFS
- IMHO, the INIT preset is useless because it has a heavy effect on all freqs, but for this kind of plugin I want it to do nothing and not treat all bands already. Thankfully, you can overwrite it (but even then you have to load it, when you load the plugin!).

My sound impression on
- low end: Magnetic and Clip are my favourites here. Both made it thicker, while the others didn't have this effect
- mids: here I preferred British, American and German, Magnetic and Clip are too sensitive and sound kind of cheap quickly
- highs: here's where Magnetic and Clip shine again
- Band 2: sadly, since its highest lower limit is 80Hz, it tends to make everything boomy, so this band is pretty much out of the equation

 

Almost bought it, but no mid-side capabilities is a big bummer IMHO.