Stereo Tool

hi i'm nigel from the uk.
hi i have been using stereo tool for a very long time now , i first found it on winamps website and i thought i might give it a try, and i am glad to say i did, it has to be the best DSP there is out there by a long way.
i use this plugin with screamer internet radio player and winamp.
since i love dubstep and drum and bass this plugin is excellent ( one more thing, i use stereo tool with my little FM transmitter so i can broadcast music all over the house. it keeps the output at a nice level so it does not overdrive the transmitter, and it works flawlessly )

i have been updating stereo tool with every new update on this site and i will continue to do so, so keep it up its awesome.
if you are the creator of stereo tool you rocK!

hvz is the creator of Stereo Tool. It is an awesome DSP solution. I'm getting better results out of his software solution than I've gotten out of ANY commercially available software solution. It is amazing, and it runs very efficiently.

I second the thank you!

well in that case then ...hvz..i don't know how you made such brilliant peace of kit but you did. ( just using it on some old dull cassettes that i have put on my computer a while back and they sound nerly like cd)

Hey DUB<^>STEP,

Thanks for your posts! I read that you're using Stereo Tool on cassette tapes. You might also want to try my cassette tape restoration plugin "Tape Restore Live!", which can be downloaded from http://www.hansvanzutphen.com/

This is mainly useful if your tapes were recorded using Dolby B, or if your recordings contain FM stereo hiss. For most of the other filters that TRL! has, Stereo Tool has better filters (I haven't worked on TRL! in the last few years).

you know its funny you should mention that about tape restore live, i found that on winamps site to a long time ago to.....it is already in my plugin dictionary i have tired it and it does work a treat..but i love to use stereo tool more because it seems to be able to polish the sound and make it just sound so much better.

but thank you again for the excellent plug ins.

the preset you added ...vamprecords"deep low" ... is awesome.! works very well with dub-step.


thank you.

one thing i found out is that it does not work very well on net book's the ones with the intel atoms.well N270.anyway. it just stutters.. the problem is that the atom is hyper threaded so it only uses one side of the cpu ..wich is a pain in the as

Intel Atoms are curently slowest cpus. It's not accidentally in NETbooks.. surf, mail, chat, low power consumption, etc.. especialy if we know that Stereo Tool is professioanl software for professional using.
But who knows maybe one day Hans will optimize it even for Atom.

Multi threaded processing will be nice. I'll give Stereo Tool a try on my D945SEJT board which will arrive on the next week but it has a single core hyper threaded Atom processor, so i don't expect that any powerful processing will be available without stuttering. It even stuttered on my Pentium4 3.0Ghz when i had it, i was very surprised that CPU can't even render audio with Stereo Tool in real time. The D945GSEJT is a great choice for a low consuming home PC, because with an AC-DC adapter it draws only ~10W of power which is excellent.

According to http://www.cpubenchmark.net/ , the speed of the Atom N270 @ 1.66 GHz is '304'. Pentium 4 3.00 GHz is '483'.

A more recent CPU like the Q9450 @ 2.66 GHz (which is what I'm using) has a speed of '3968' - that's 992 per core! Which is still slow when compared to the even newer i5 and i7 series. (The Intel Core i7 975 @ 3.33GHz has a speed of 6931 - that's 1732 per core, one core equals about 4 Pentium 4's @ 3 GHz!)


Stereo Tool does indeed require quite a lot of processing power, but there are a few ways to reduce it:
1. If you don't need very loud output, set Loudness to 1.00. Loudness is the most CPU intensive filter, this will immediately reduce the CPU load by a large amount.
2. See the tips on this page: http://help.stereotool.com/cpu_usage.shtml

well i did that and it did improve somewhat but it still stutters like hell..just did a quick check and yes it is using 50 % cpu.

it works flawlessly on my other pc..but that's got an overclocked e8500 at 4.4ghz.

but i recon if you can get it to somehow use both cores then that shud help. (this is why i don't like hyper therded cpu,s)



srcew it i'm not complaining its still the best dsp there is out there. ....but it would be nice if it could use both cores.