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Originally Posted by Mikey MTC  Which plugs would they be? I find Waves plugs to be easily among the best out there already so would love to know what's better. |
If you're looking for emulation, UAD. Sonnox, some of the voxengo stuff, chandler, is all very good quality stuff without hopping on the waves train. If you want surgical transparency, DAW stock plugins do just fine. There's only so many ways you can do DSP math, especially when you want to be accurate.
Don't get me wrong, there are a few cool waves gems out there that have had quite a bit of care put into them. Especially some of the models. It's not to say you could create the same thing though with some technique know how on how convolution, phase, FFTs, distortion, etc works and what those methods sound like under different parameters.
The thing is, many algorithms for plugs originally get designed at universities/institutes such as Stanford, MIT, and IRCAM, the white papers get published, and they get put into software. It's sold very "magic box" like when in fact it isn't. Gear is far different because the components all effect the signal in different ways on different devices resulting in vastly different sound whereas in the computer it's simply a mathematical calculation. (Not news for you I hope.) You can change some trivial stuff, like changing variations in parameters as is used in some of the analog emulations to reflect subtle change in voltage, but the fundamental process ALWAYS remains the same no matter what you do, at least until the folks at IRCAM, Stanford, and MIT come up with a new algorithm and write a new white paper on it. (Which many of those have not even made it into plugins yet due to being far too CPU intensive for RT work in large numbers.)
A trivial example of a waves ripoff is something like the vocal rider, which is essentially nothing but an envelope follower keyed from the instrumental mix then modulating the output gain on the vocal chain with a width of how many dB you want to ride above the track. If you got Reaktor, Max, or anything like that on your system you could make the exact same thing front to back in virtually 10 minutes and have the patch forever to call back up. Personally, I'd just rather take the 10 minutes over the 300 bucks but that's just my way of thinking. I guess some don't want to go through that whole thing, but for me it's been very rewarding and I'm also very punk and DIY at heart. :P