Stereo Tool

Gave it a try. Hate to be harsh or critical, but at least on my setup it sounds like a tape being chewed up. Extremely rapid wow and flutter. I solved it by significantly decreasing the Levels > Density settings for MB2 and increasing the attack/release times for both MB1 and MB2, as well as disabling Single Band.

Some rules of thumb I follow when designing presets to get smoother signal tracking:
- I read somewhere that Multiband 2 is hard-coded to be analog mode only. Why? I have no idea it just is. But it explains why it reacts more harshly than MB1 placed in digital mode. I use it for a light amount of post-leveling and limiting.
- Attack times on MB1 (digital) should be minimum 1ms, release should be minimum 20ms.
- Attack times on MB2 should be minimum 10ms, release should be minimum 75ms.
- Never limit more than 10dB.
- Only use Azimuth, Stereo Boost and ACR Stereo. The other options sound like a low bit-rate MP3 file.
- Don't phase delay unless you have a reason to do it (e.g. the bass distortion of a DBP 7+4).
- Use Natural Dynamics and AutoEQ sparingly.
- AGC Matrix Mode should only be used without other ST enhancers, and even then only sparingly. ACR works better.

My $2 worth, hope it helps!

Well... Firstly... your preset sends my system to 60%+ cpu util... and Its a Ryzen 9 - 12 core!

More observations,
1) Your gain structures are not right.. the AGC hardly does anything +2.0 on the final clipper
this leads me to believe your gain structure is not what it should be
2) you have 200% L-R with 20 msec delay.. This is bad.. and causing reverb
3) if your going to use this on FM, your going to find it hard to get constant 100% mod

I'll have a bit of a play and post it back for you

OK I first un-bloated your preset, its now small enough to be posted without zip

So, all I did to your preset is change the gains, reduced stereo delay to a more realistic figure
and turned off stereo reverb and set the Bandpass filter to 15k

I didnt change any of your processing.. just levels

You will notice the output scope is full most of the time now.

I actually think thats quite easy to listen to now

Thank you very much for letting me know that the preset was bloated. I still can't understand what causes that, but when I loaded the preset on my system everything was broken.

The multibands were maxing out, the audio was distorted out to the max and so on. This led me to realize that it's not my settings that makes everything sound awful, but something with the ST installation. I reinstalled it and it works like a charm now, this preset sounds great, the setting really work as I expect them to and just everything works. And to mention that my CPU usage dropped a lot.

Still one more question, how do you unbloat a preset? And what causes it?