So it’s a pleasure to report that most of these issues have been swept aside in the first Diamond plug-in. Despite this, though, the Acqua plug-ins I’ve tried still fall slightly short of conventional plug-ins in usability terms, thanks to large installation files, an annoying authorisation system, slow loading times, unresponsive interfaces and heavy loads on the host computer. Each Acqua plug-in ‘samples’ a specific hardware device, and comes with a skeuomorphic graphical interface tailored to suit.
#DIAMOND BUT PLUG SERIES#
The Acqua series represents a conscious effort by Acustica to package dynamic convolution in a format that won’t alienate people accustomed to ‘normal’ plug-ins. As an experiment, I routed some pink noise through it and examined the results on a spectrum analyser at maximum boost, the HMF band appears to apply a boost that is pretty much flat from 500Hz to 10kHz, while the effects of the HF band extend well into the audible spectrum even with the centre frequency set to 50kHz. There are no bandwidth controls at all, and you don’t have to play with Color-EQ for long to realise that the HMF and HF bands work across a very broad area of the frequency spectrum. The EQ gain knobs are not calibrated, but the maximum boost available seems to vary, from about 10dB for the HF band to twice that for the LF. A third band, labelled HMF, has a fixed centre frequency, while the final HF band can be set anywhere between 15 and 50 kHz(!). The two leftmost bands are labelled LF and LMF, with frequency ranges that span 20-60 Hz and 80-120 Hz respectively. The EQ itself features four bands, in an arrangement that is very unusual but which turns out to be surprisingly useful. These have more than mere utility value, because the plug-in includes a switchable preamp stage that needs to be driven appropriately, if used.
At either side of the plug-in window you’ll find input and output gain dials. Though it combines elements ‘sampled’ from several different source devices, Diamond Color-EQ distils these into a simple processor with very few controls. Among them is Italian engineer Luca Pretolesi of Studio DMI, one of the world’s leading specialists in mixing EDM and other electronic music and the first product in Acustica’s new Diamond range is a plug-in that recreates Pretolesi’s own mix-bus EQ chain.
#DIAMOND BUT PLUG PROFESSIONAL#
As a result, the Acqua range has won numerous fans in professional mixing circles.
In its early incarnations, this technology had the reputation of being complex and difficult to use, but the company’s ever-growing range of Acqua plug-ins shows that it is possible to present dynamic convolution in a user-friendly fashion. The first plug-in from Acustica’s new Diamond range recreates the master bus EQ of a master!Īcustica Audio have pioneered the use of dynamic convolution to recreate hardware in software.
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