Stereo Tool

Just chiming in here: I didn’t develop the preset to be smashed to the wall. Nor did I develop it to be the most open thing possible. The goal of the preset is to dramatically even out differences in density between different kinds of programming. As mentioned originally, it is designed for FM, and in a 75us environment at that. From my experience developing it, the most common way to develop a lifeless smashed sound is to overdrive the clipper. So I strongly agree with Hans’ suggestion to back out of the clipper a decent amount to assess whether it gets better.

If it does not, you can do a couple things: 1) Make the window larger. It has a 3dB U shaped window. That’s pretty big for a U shaped window. But try 4 or 5. The compressors will park on all but the very most dynamic material. 2) Reduce the release multiplier from 5x to something like 3x. This won’t affect dense material at all. But it will dramatically affect dynamic material.

This is exactly what I notice as well. I notice more of my songs sound "not right" to my ears than they do "right." I hear ST get compared to the 9 and 11 quite a bit by others, but the 9 and 11 never seem to make anything sound "not right" and the 9 and 11 sound a lot more natural and open as well. I will add when I hear what I'm hearing in ST, it is more apparent though to me on FM versus streaming.

I have been testing with a variety of different genres. AC, Soft AC, Rock, Hip Hop, Oldies, Pop, Country etc. The new compressor sounds better, but the hard to describe "wimpy" Stereo Tool sound is still prevalent to my ears at times.

I might try and record some nicely processed stations around here, upload a link, and describe what qualities I like and dislike about the sounds of each stations in the recordings and see if others agree with me as well in hopes this helps Hans better pinpoint exactly what people do and don't like hearing and potentially solve these sound issues for good rather than having to keep fixing them constantly after the final product is released.
I believe Hans will figure it out. He is a very smart individual. It's still early and still being developed, so I'm sure he will find a way to make this work and sound amazing and get it to surpass every other audio processor that's currently out on the market.

Just found a bug: Intellilimiter does nothing if Limit is set to OFF. Will fix that for the next build, but this explains why some people saw no effect from it.

Today's preset update. A little more limiter action for band 1 (1dB), and a little louder overall output for band 1 (0.5dB). Total output slightly reduced (0.5dB). Mids and highs will now be hitting the clipper a little less hard.

Based on my experience so far, I hear more density in a pleasant way.
Overall sound is far more clean on highs with the same preset settings.
I had to disable highs exciter (2db) and lower highs on 2nd multiband too.

For my taste it's more clean and consistent. Attack and release times are set just as proposed.

Keep up the good work!

I would guess you're liking it because the multiband is doing more of the work itself and leaning on the clippers less.

Probably! But I'm using my own preset. Here is comparison between live FM and adaptive multiband through MPX tool:

https://we.tl/t-I7qbZU6ebi

Notice that adaptive one gives more deep bass and crispier highs with already lowered highs in multiband 2 (sure it has some impact FM vs MPX tool, but not that much).

Here I don't hear that up and down that much like in my previous test.

But I am getting that right: Every old preset can't be used with the new adaptive mode and has to be adjusted?

You can use your existing preset, but you will likely want to make adjustments. Because the compressor is so much more capable of dynamically making changes to adapt to programming conditions, you'll probably want to at least adjust attack and release.

Do you hear it at all though? If so, where? Because I really don't.
This new thing works completely differently. You can use your existing band structure etc, but the attack/release and all such settings behave completely different, and you'll likely have to adjust the thresholds a lot as well. Just switching to the new mode could accidentally work, but it can also be completely wrong.

It's also a compressor. And it also uses multiple bands. Those are about all the simularities.