I have noticed that many vst programs are massively praised, they rise to the sky, until they break. When that happens, the massive finding of flaws in those plugins begins and in the end no one even talks about them anymore, but new, unbroken ones are found and they brag and fantasize about them...

 

When you'll try El Rey, remember that that thing has a huge midrange scoop, high end and low end boosts. Ridiculously big for a master bus eq. I have no doubt a smiley EQ will make most people mixes sound sligtly better, but don't forget is the EQ, not the actual compression

 

My most used tools I use in all my mixes and clients tracks. AA been my favorite to use for years now and enjoy what they come up with. Using on both systems Mac and pc and bloat or space was never a problem for me.

 

How could you see them there if they weren't R2Red ??????

 

Till now the only one i kept is Taupe for the compressor only

 

El Rey 2 has a knob to flatten the EQ so it can be used on buss tracks without coloring them too much.

 

Plugins I have tried and like.

Desert - This has a really nice vintage sound that I like especially the eqs.

Straw - Again nice vintage sound a little more hifi than Desert id say.

Cream2 - I like the eqs from this another for vintage sound.

Gold5 - Pre amp sound really nice when you drive it unlike any of the black models. Eq is amazing 8122 model on snare!!!

Crimson - Saturation beast it sound like your driving hardware.

Coffee - Another nice vintage sound although I need to spend more time with it.

Pumpkin Pro - Only dabbled but this has huge potential and sound amazing to my ears.

Jam - I really like this again the sauration is really tasty and like Pumpkin Pro has various models to choose from. Only for me the mix knob introduces phase so have to use it at 100% wet hopefully theres a fix for that or I'm just doing something wrong.

Lava - Works really well with my microphones on drums and has way of changing the sound of a vst put a pre amp after and it can get really convincing also good for sound design.

Fire The Pump - I like that quick and easy to dial in the saturation good for sound design.

Silver - has some nice rooms and spaces that blend really well and silver volumes I & L are my favs I had to take it off for space though hopefully r2r gets the size down a good bit I'll find a way to put that on an external.

Plugins I have tried and don't care for.

Black - I like the idea of it but in practice it can't be driven at all its sounds like a placebo the only one that seems to do anything is the veridian model that has a Bass/LowMid hump for the size and cpu it take id expect to at least hear something compare that to the gold pre and you will think black is broken or something filters work though. If you imaginarily slapped yourself I think this is what it would feel like.

Honey3 - Didnt like the eqs that much and it seems a little too bland for my taste.


Ones I'm looking forward to trying out.

Cardinal
Olive
Mystic
Water
Tulip
Smoke
Mint
Brown
Indigo
Camel


Just my two cents.

 

Last edited: Nov 26, 2023

Ratings are very high towards R2R of his massive and precious work. And if you read the comments you will realize the incredible issues that these plugins have. Those are aimed at Acustica Audio. If one day R2R decides to release the AAA softwares (UAD, PT etc) you will see numbers never seen before on sister site. And that will be MASSIVE.

 

Kudos to R2R to have allowed us to test these plugins.
That being said. They are exactly as they were years ago.
Extremely CPU hungry. That alone is a no go for me.
I'll stick to UAD for the time being for my "analog like" VSTs... And they are hundreds of other fabulous plugins more CPU efficient.

 

obsolete

 

First off that's just plain ignorant. People have been debating Nebula and Acoustica since 2007. Probably before you even knew what a "vst program", (LOL!), even was. Oh and, gsmogli get your own f#cking avatar. Don't steal other people's!

 

well, I am writing to report that fircomp2 was lighter on cpu, easier to use, and sounded better than Midnight.

 

In the EARLY days, there was NO one else coming close on saturations.
Everything was captured, even the subtle "transformer sound".

Same with MECHANICAL reverbs : plate, spring ... oil can
Because dynamic is very important on those mechanical effects.

It was there already on Nebula 1. And i was an early adopter.

But algos pushed, other devs started to use black box, white box, profiling like Kemper ... and now, it is a LOT less obvious.

Years and years of settings all over the place, useless gigabytes (and now we know why ...), more support from fanboys than devs themselves, concurrent products ... I don't really know what is left.

If someone want to get the "cream" of Acustica products, find your favorite saturations and stick with them.
Like Soundtoys getting their specific signature from saturation (and why Decapitator is their flagship product).

At least, try their mechanical reverbs/delays
They are really alive like nothing else (apart the real thing).

You can use a single console profile on master, it will "glue" things in a nice way.

But putting Acustica plugins on all tracks ... no way for me.
Even as an early adopter (no more) fanboy

 

My opinion about acustica acqua plug-ins is based on 4 old free plug-ins :
RED EQ = great ! Using all the time the mid and high bands on distorted guitars, sometimes on other stuff and even on some final masters ! Sometimes, fixed bands and Qs are just what is needed! I like its gritty sound. I rarely use the low band and use TDR Slick EQ (free) for cleaner lows. For flavouring. For any accurate / technical job, I'm using either my old Ozone5 or FF Pro-Q. If I had the choice to keep only one 'flavouring EQ', it would be this one, but if I could just keep only one EQ of any kind, of course, I'd take a versatile clean digital EQ.

TAN = works but sounds not so great. It sounds truly 'analogue'. Like my Behringer mdx 2100 Composer (a totally decent compressor) sounded 'analogue'. The only hardware analog compressors I've used were several Behringer models, Alesis 3630, Drawmer - dont remember which one, and Neve VR channel comp. Eveytime I'm using Tan, I think of the Behringer Composer. Although TAN has different controls and a different sound and is probably more versatile, the VCA behaviour is very obvious, the way it was with Composer. Certainly useable but there are FAR better options when it comes to compression. This one sounds 'analogue' but certainly not 'high end'.

Voice preamp (dont remember the actual name) = does almost nothing... (and doesnt sound that much 'analog' - OK, it's very old)

OCHRE EQ = bland sounding EQ, absolutely ininteresting.

These probably dont say a lot about how modern AA plug-ins are sounding, but I wont go into the hassle of trying them. There might be a gem hidden into the amount of stuff released, but I will not bother to look for it.

 

I haven't bothered downloading any of these releases because -- I really don't need another hundred control strips and EQ's that I won't use.

But you're tempting me here. Which are the best reverbs/delays? Best saturators?

I'm really not convinced my ears are sufficiently good to be able to tell great from mediocre any more anyway.

 

They eat my CPUwwww!!!

 

Hi guys, i just try to met some people who got the same new problem as me using the MagicFlow pluggin... he suddendly eat my cpu like 37% before my template never crashed when i used it ... i don't know if there is an update to be incoming to resolve that but i don't like it :''(
for info i got : i7 10k700
32Go ram

 

The plugins appear to be solutions for problems that didn't exist.
Very niche, look very dated.

 

To be honest, I tried all the shared ones. I only kept about a third. None of them really impressed me in the way that many others already do these days. I don't think I'd buy any compared to the alternatives. Yes the GUI's look very dated. Once upon a time I suppose these were the thing to have maybe.,. One word would be . . overrated

(that said, if you like plugins that sound indistinguishable from no plugin,. maybe you'll like these. I found many don't really change anything I can actually hear for the most part)

 

I

Some of the guis are nice