Stereo Tool

Glad to see Bojcha back in the game! Could you post a screen shot of your processing page?

Many thanks for that! It's really great to have you back in. You kind of have a good feeling about what you have to set like it sounds good.
It will probably take some time until the release of the current version anyway. Maybe it's really better to wait a little while like you wrote here.

I think on the next beta, you'll be able to fine tune *much* more closely.

So Hans, I have tested and watched this new symmetrical mode intensively with the multiband compressors for the last days. It is really interesting to follow the graphical representation, because it shows exactly what you have already described. The compressor floats on the amplitude. In the case of highly compressed signals, hardly any new compression occurs, and with a lot of dynamics, the system optimizes itself almost automatically. This is incredibly impressive. The compressor reacts intelligently to incoming signals. This also works in extreme cases, for example when I work with beep tones. Such a fast reaction time and one hardly notices the compression, which speaks for a very good compression. Especially with classical music, the new compressor is particularly impressive. Have you ever thought about publishing this multiband compressor as a separate product? I think that many people who have been waiting for such a product in the field of music production. Unfortunately, I find out more and more that the music industry uses some very old compressors, and that the final product usually sounds anything but good. All that matters now is the volume, and there's nothing wrong with any means. It's a pity that this opinion prevails. And here, the compressor of yours provides a certain remedy, because it does not compress everything dead, but works very well.

I couldn't agree more. It has issues right now. There are still things that need to be worked out. But this compressor finally responds to audio the way I've always wanted it to. Hans hit the ball out of the park with this change. It sounds simple, but making a compressor only work when there's something to actually do is a lot harder than it looks.

Tell me about it

Should the Basstadizer in default mode produce so much asymmetric bass between the left and right channels? This seems wrong. It also adds a pretty sharp cut at 100 hz when using the other bass bost tools (Bass Boost & True Bass).


Basstadizer off:



Basstadizer on with default settings:



Basstadizer on, lookahead changed to 20ms and Headroom changed to 65%:

Another thing I sort of found out on my own, "Low Level Boost" probably shouldn't be used at all. It seems to in many cases add quite a lot of unpleasant sounding distortion. I didn't realize it only appears when "Extreme Tweaker" is selected and is categorized as experimental. The only thing I could find about this filter on all of stereotool.com is it was added in 8.0 and intended to be used with classical music.


Low Level Boost off:



Low Level Boost On (This surely can't be right! ):



Low Level Boost on, Max Release Speed changed to 0:



Given this, it seems it really shouldn't even be in there (even on Extreme Tweaker), or should at least have "Experimental" written on it somewhere in the UI.

@All night: LLB worked well before my latest changes but I haven't tested it anymore. So I'm not sure. For classical music it did the trick before.

By asymmetric bass, do you mean top vs bottom? Or - given the screenshots (but I don't know what the two lines mean) left and right? It definitely shouldn't be different for left and right so something must be wrong if it's that.

Yes, it's a frequency response curve, the two lines are left channel and right channel. They merge the more Lookahead is increased on Basstadizer.

(VST Plugin Analyser Tool Download: http://www.pcjv.de/applications/measurement-programs/)