End of thread. Period. Everybody back to producing their nursery rhymes.

 

DELETED: all of them
KEPTD: none of them

 

You can say that again. I've even taken a screenshot. This legend-to-be comment should be preserved for years to come

 

C'mon Xupito, give some appreciation for the Rupert Neve from our era, the one and only Gianka.

 

Everyone has their opinions about what sounds good (best) and what doesn't. A LOT of it is subjective. Judging from what passes as legit in the industry these days would have been laughed out of existence a few decades ago. Many I know still subscribe to a more purist form of production recognizing the modern "approach" as a sort of novelty that has it's place, but not to be taken seriously in any professional circles.

The AA catalog, in my opinion, has its place and can be used with success in the hands of those who really believe in the tech used to create them. Pretty much every AA piece I have played around with seems to have a learning curve associated with it all of its own. For the most part each one has a distinct personality both in the sound it produces and in the way it operates. For someone who has a more quickened pace to their production workflow, this can be a hindrance unless they take the time beforehand to learn the plugin, and therefore be able to obtain results more quickly. There are limits to this as to how much pre-learning one is willing to take on for any given amount of plugins.

The acustica catalog has a few other detractors as well. The first one being the prices of most of their stuff sometimes being 2-3 times that of their smaller algorithmic counterparts. The second being weight. A great portion of the legit AA catalog as we all know now is tempered with a burdensome copy protection scheme that make the bit-weight of a single plugin greater than the size of most entire DAW programs out there. This can be a hindrance in the way the plugins look and feel when they are used. Also the amount of computing resources used doubles or triples which manifests in a compromise in overall efficiency in the operation of the entire workstation. Couple all of this with slow-rolling, quirky, sometimes intuition defying graphical user interfaces (there's that learning curve again) and you have the making of a poor experience being had for many who are used to grabbing for an algorithmic control and hearing exactly what they would expect by the tweaking of that control.

At the end of the day, with acustica you'll either love them or hate them. The tech used to create them will either make them or break them depending on how one embraces it. Personally, I would never buy any of it - too expensive for too little in return and you basically have to learn each plugin as a separate animal in order to get any real use out of it. Others will obviously disagree which is to be expected.

 

lol
Actually, I think the core technology behind Nebula/AA plugs (volterra kernels) is brilliant. I went through the rabbit hole of the math/DSP behind it several years ago. It really is unique and should sound better than most/all alternatives for some music hardware. Not all.

Also, it must be done very well (the sampling procedure). And there's a valid reason for the high cpu usage.

But the commercial practices in general... well

PS. Also, I'm pretty sure @shinyzen was joking/trolling with that comment

 

Last edited: Jun 17, 2024

Sold: Diamond Eq, Indigo, Diamond Lift
Selling: Lime, Cream, Pink, Cobalt
Kept: Navy, Azure, Ivory, Ash, Tiger Ultra, Snow, Cerise, Celestial, Erin.

 

The product is good; the company and the people behind it are terrible. Avoid Acqua and go straight to Nebula and third party developers. I do regret buying directly from them because they are an abusive company. Skip all the new Ultra garbage. The underlying technology is very good in the hands of people who actually care about the sampling process. The technology will be irrelevant in a few years due to AI sampling.

 

Deleted all of them, zero left. And never looked back.

 

Kept Cherry and Jam
Cherry has some super smooth highs.

 

Was liking El Rey and Brown but not gonna buy them, so I trashed 'em. There's nothing going on there I can't achieve with what I've got.
(I've never even seen anybody else mention the Brown suite, maybe that could have been my secret weapon )

 

Last edited: Jul 2, 2024

After some time my bag with Acustica plugins became way smaller than when i was testing em out. Found out that i prefer Nebula/Old AA over Hyper-Tech plugins. On a daily basis i use:
Nebula
Amethyst
Ash
Black
Brown
Cream
El Rey
Diamond Eq
Taupe

And i eventually use(and love):
Blonde
Tulip
Smoke
Coffee

 

They sound fine. Bloated though. A real hassle. I like Brown, Gold, and Ruby. Impressed with Emerald. Green and Erin were good. I guess. Oh yeah, I really liked Cola. That was a winner. Do I use them? Nah. I don't like how it uses resources. The ultra stuff is pretty good though. Was just a phase.

 

I deleted everything I had and then reinstalled only to delete again. To be fair I haven't tried any of the new stuff.

 

They thing with these plugins is that they're all so specific, I wonder if they even intend to have people buy and/or use them all. They come across like you might buy and use 3-5 very specific ones, they all seem to be combinations of features of hardware units for people who really also want the saturation exactly right.

I still have to try more of them, but they sound alright:

https://www.kvraudio.com/product/basstard-by-acustica-audio

That one stacks multiple instances well to get a good sound. They're really specific, the people who dislike them I think make genres of music where they're non or minimally applicable, a lot of them seem like they're only designed for one instance to be used, then you put them on the master bus (or possibly just a drum/etc . . . bus).

https://justpaste.it/AcusticaAudioAcquaMasterList

There are lists of what they are and what they are intended for.

 

I wanted to mention this, but did not know a good thread to put it in. So I will add it here. Maybe it is only relative to Mac, and maybe not.

When the Acustica plugins were released, they only contained the necessary "samples" for them to work correctly at 44.1Khz and 96khz. Using Blue Cat Audio's Patchwork was suggested as a workaround for this, by using oversampling setting in Patchwork to match other sample rates. It doesn't work on Mac. It appears to work, and many of the controls "work" because they are controls which are not affected by the missing sample data. In Nebula 4, if any control is moved around but the underlying sample is missing; Nebula 4 will snap the control back to 0 immediately. These plugins will not do this. You will not see this going on, unless you actually look for it via Plugin Doctor, or just rendering some waveforms to inspect visually.

All the cute comments from users and even the developer himself about, "if you can't hear it, you need better monitors"; are probably related to this more than any other one thing. If Bluecat's Patchwork oversampling "circuit" is after the audio is sent to the plugin loaded into it and oversampled when the audio returns to Patchwork, that would explain it. And it most likely is done that way. If someone wants to know, they can figure out how to test that within Patchwork. Otherwise, it is just as simple as only using either 44.1khz or 96Khz sessions.

 

Last edited: Nov 15, 2024

The only things worth to keep are the NFOs, tha spanking milestone.

 

As far as i'm yet to know some analog emulation dev that sounds better than Acustica and UAD, i will happily keep using them.

 

they are not that specific. an eq is an eq, a compressor is a compressor. they have different curves, attack / release times etc, but i wouldnt call that specific, or genre dependent.

As far as i know, this is only the "alternative" versions released on sister site. They were created using the demos, which do come with limited sample rates. Im not aware of any actual acustica releases that are missing sample rates. I think theres a couple where you had to download them separately, but most of them have all as part of the package.