Stereo Tool

A man once described his clipper plugin as "Its output is what comes into it… only louder." That's the basic idea of any radio station processor, right?

Well, with great power comes great responsibility. This preset can most definitely rival the hottest station on the dial, and a few tricks are snuck in to accomplish ridiculous levels of loudness without destroying the sound completely. However, shall you decide to keep some dynamics (which you totally should!), this preset provides a smooth, clean listening experience.

Ingredients in order of appearance:

• Noise Gate: Not much to say about this. Takes the hiss out and that's great.
• Natural Dynamics: Punchin' thru.
• Phase Rotator: It's there. It does its job.
• AutoEQ: Tuned for flat response and given a lot of freedom. Can change the sonic character quite drastically from the original recording as my goal was to provide an uniform listening experience. No bass? No highs? There, I fixed it!
• AGC: One band. That's all you need. Basic gain rider, no fancy crap. A lot of drive to cater for the widest variations you may have in your music library.
• ACR Stereo: The nicest stereo widener makes an appearance here.
• Parametric EQ: My signature touch. Feel free to mess with it or turn it off altogether, your call.
• Bass EQ: Listening to Michael Jackson or folk music? Here's more bass. You're welcome.
• Multiband 1: 7 bands of glory. Designed to level frequencies out and not much else. Some peak protection and gating included.
• Immersive Bass and True Bass: Make it phat. Enough said.
• Absolute Highs: 128kbit mp3? It will still shine.
• Multiband 2: Same deal as the first one, just a bit more aggressive. Serves to tighten up the processing done by the bass and upper treble enhancements. Limiting and clipping get turned up a notch, band coupling is added to keep the sound signature. Gets gated out of the way when there's no need for it.
• Bass Clipper: Keeping those fat lows from splattering all over the spectrum.
• Singleband: Stays out of the way unless you REALLY crank it. When you do, it makes a noticeable difference.
• Advanced Clipper: Creme de la creme. If bright and saturated is your cup of tea, you know what to do with it.

All the processors are tuned for flat frequency response (if you turn off the personalized EQ) and try to stay out of the way as much as possible when they are not needed. This preset is suitable for all kinds of material and does not try to emulate some other piece of gear, it's meant to put out the best ST has to offer.

My thoughts on ST 9.40:
Too many things to mess around with, really...

Been chasing some really weird pumping all day long - turns out it was the "pre-AGC". Turned it off - the AGC sounds the way I expected it to. I'm intrigued by the presence of this particular control, the AGC is meant to be a slow, smooth gain rider, not a compressor. Anyone care to chime in on that?

I loaded a preset I made 4 years ago, when there weren't THAT many processors in ST. Immediately I was greeted by a slappin' loud, "in your face" sound, that also managed to be a lot cleaner than what I had managed to accomplish using this new version. And that preset was using a single multiband and the old, deprecated bass boost.

Investigating further, I ran some test signals thru each processor at a time and tweaked the hell out of everything. This preset is the result.