no, not at all.

what makes something superior for me is when something is really unique. this type of products make my arsenal of possibilities greater when they appear. the 137th ping pong delay does not. not even when it supports 5 terahertz and is signed by elvis personally.

that is also why i used to create lot of plug-is myself. for example i wrote the first multichannel plug-ins, the first stereo phase vocoder, the first quadrophony encoders, the first frequency shifters, the first midi plug-ins, the first plug-in linking plug-ins, the first plug-ins which do something with video or internet communication and many more things for the macintosh platform, many of which are still the only ones which exist for the classic mac system in 2001.


regarding upsampling as quality characteristic:

that is something which, when done right, can be useful and might still be missing in some lesser freeware products, but one should not overrate it for effects. because upsampling can today be found in some host programs, so that you can add it to every effect you want, or build it around a whole effects chain.

a counter example is of course synthesizers, such as FM synths, where upsampling of x8 or more can make sense.
for those guys it must be right inside the generator, since it is required 1.) per voice and 2.) not always at the very end of the process, so that you can not do it from "outside".


"bit correct calculation" is in my opinion is also often overrated.

you want to have that in DACs, IO drivers and in the main volume control of a software, but not neccessarily in a special effect or a compressor, where it means nothing. the noise which gets added when you do down from 64 bits to 24 bit later in the master file is thousand times higher.

there was that funny story where max/msp had an error where the upper half of 64 bit float signals was done wrong and shifted down for one value. then we found that even matlab(!) had the same bug.
64 bit audio has 190 db, which is more than one million times more deep than the SNR of any analog mixing desk will ever be.

 

Last edited: Apr 17, 2024