Hello and welcome to this Sound on Sound podcast. I'm Paul White and with me is Hugh Robjohns. Hello there. And this time we'll be talking about some of the gear we've reviewed during the past year. 

Hugh, what's impressed you? I think I picked four items for gear of the year, and I didn't actually review one of them, to be fair, but I did buy it, so it still counts. Being a bit of a Hammond nut, my first gear of the year item was the Universal Audio Waterfall Leslie simulation plug in. There are obviously loads and loads of Leslie emulators around some built in to Hammond type virtual instruments and some freestanding that you can use for other things like electric pianos and vocals and guitars and whatever. 

The Universal Audio one was originally developed to go with their virtual Hammond organ emulation, but then they decided it was so good, rightly so, that they split it off and you can now use it independently as well. Obviously the Waterfall name comes from the Waterfall keys on a classic Hammond organ.

And the thing about it is, That it's incredibly real. Leslie emulations are incredibly complicated because you've got Doppler shifts and amplitude variations, and they're all cyclical, but in a very complicated way. So, I mean, they have improved. Leslie emulations have improved enormously over the last decade or so, mainly because the understandings improved, but also the DSP power to do the emulations properly has improved a lot.

But just doing the Leslie emulation, the Doppler and the amplitude variations and all that, isn't actually enough. I mean, it sounds like a Leslie, and maybe that's all people want. And they can change the speed and make it ramp up and down, and you can make the high frequencies ramp up and down at a different rate to the low frequencies, which is again a critical part of the way a Leslie works.

But actually, there are other things. There are mechanical noises. That are just as important to the creation or the emulation of a real Leslie and the universal version gets that exactly right I mean, it's little things like when you change speed you get the click which is the relay changing over changing the voltage to the two motors  A lot of emulations don't include that and many times you'd never hear it.

But if you're doing sort of delicate work, you can hear it and it just makes a difference. And it's just one of those little mechanical background noises that that makes you think it's real. There's other things like when you change speed. Going from fast to slow you get this kind of belt slip and it's a kind of whooshing noise.

You also get rumbles because you've got big lumps of wood rotating at huge rates of knots and there's a rumble in there and it's only low level but it just makes it real in a way that other emulations just sound kind of plastic. That's interesting because I was talking to Dr. Dave, who is the designer at UA several years ago and saying, why don't you do a Leslie emulation?

And he was saying, well, they're actually really complicated to do. So I'm glad they finally got it nailed. But how much CPU does this thing take? Oh, I've no idea. It works fine on my machine. That's all I cared about. I mean, it's, it is quite a thirsty thing. A lot of the UA plugins are quite thirsty, but you can run it natively.

There's a native version, or you can run it on the DSP accelerator.  And I was running on the accelerator. You can change the microphones, you can change the microphone positions, you know, it's all the usual kind of facilities that people give you which changes the character of the sound quite enormously, but it's just, it just sounds so real.

I'm just hoping they bring it out on their pedal range.  I wouldn't be at all surprised actually. It is a very good emulation.  Oh, that's good. I checked out the new BOSS GM800 guitar synthesizer. I mean, BOSS and Roland have been working on these things since 1977, and I've bought quite a lot of the models, starting with their very first one and along the way.

But this one, I think they've finally nailed the tracking issue. So it tracks quickly, it tracks reliably, it's not difficult to use. It's got a good repertoire of on board sounds. And you can also go onto the Roland Cloud and subscribe, and using their Xenology platform, you can download additional sounds into the machine.

So there's quite a lot to love, and it doesn't take up too much pedalboard space.  The only complication for existing users is that it doesn't use the standard GK split pickup. It uses a new one with a serial protocol. However, there is an adapter so that if you do have the old devices or a guitar with the GK system built in, you can buy this adapter box and plug straight into the GM800 and off you go. 

Now, many of us old timers are rather glad to see the back of the old technology, to be honest. I mean, vinyl, tape, or even CDs. They all had their problems, and yet a lot of these old technologies are coming back in a fashionable kind of way. I mean, what have you been looking at now? A vinyl cutting emulator?

I know, nostalgia, isn't it? Yeah, I mean, vinyl is actually still remarkably popular. But one of the issues with vinyl mastering is that, All of the vinyl mastering lathes are pretty old these days. I mean, they all date back to the, or the good ones date back to the eighties, really. So getting spare parts is not as easy as it used to be.

And they're very expensive.  And one of the risks when you cut a record is that if you get it wrong, you can actually damage the cutter head and replacing a cutter head is definitely not a cheap thing to be doing. So, a company called Tokyo Dawn records have come up with a plugin that Which simulates cutting a vinyl record and it's very configurable so you can match it to all of the parameters of your real mastering studio lathe and you can practice cutting a record.

You can adjust all the parameters, the input level, the equalization all sorts of things to see whether you can actually cut a vinyl record. Some piece of music onto a record, whether it's a 45 inch single or an EP or an album or whatever it is.  So you can go through all the parameters, you can work out how to cut this thing, how to get all the tracking exactly right to maximize your cut into the record.

And once you've worked out what to do it, you can take all those settings, put it onto your mechanical lathe. and actually do the job for real and cut into the lacquer and send it off to the factory. So it's for a mastering house, it's a really useful tool, so you can practice cuts without risking the lathe.

But actually, if you're a bit of a scientific nerd like me, and I suspect you, it's really interesting just to play with it and see how relatively small changes to the way that you mix something, how you limit it, you know, the peak levels, the bass, how wide the stereo is, all those things. Really make a big difference to the way you can cut a record and it's just fascinating to see and play with And so to that end Tokyo Dawn actually do two versions They do the full professional version and they do a slightly cut down version Which is a bit cheaper for nerdy people like me who just want to see what's possible  Sounds good here  Okay  in terms of what I found interesting And inexpensive, because those are my two main criteria these days.

The little Presonus Eris E3. 5 speakers. They do a Bluetooth version and a non Bluetooth version, but they're surprisingly inexpensive. They're tiny little things with a 3. 5 inch woofer in. Can you call it a woofer when it's only three and a half inches?  Actually you can because this thing really kicks at low frequencies.

It just sounds like big monitors but slightly quieter.  And I'm using them in my studio upstairs at the moment, and they're just astonishing. I know that ported speakers always suffer from a little bit of time hangover at the bottom end, but these seem to be actually tighter than most of the ones I've heard.

I don't know how they do it, I think there must be elves inside or something.  It's only magic. Yeah, so inexpensive. Great for the small studio. So if you've got a small studio or in my case, Studio B in the office, perfect speaker. Excellent. That sounds really good. So what else is on your list of Destiny, Hugh?

My third product is again, it's hugely expensive. I'm afraid, sorry about that. A lot of people would be familiar with Prism Audio's ADA8 and now ADA8 XR. Converter system, which is a modular system. Basically it, it takes eight inputs and gives eight outputs, but you know, it's modular. You can specify what those outputs are, analog and digital and, you know, pro tools, HDX interfaces and all the rest.

And it's been a studio standard for a great many years now.  And obviously, people tend to use more than eight channels these days, so you often see a bay full of, you know, a stack of these things.  People are getting into much, much higher channel counts with ambient sound systems, things like, you know, Dolby Atmos and so on.

They can have up to 128 channels and if you're working in Dante, you can have certainly 64 channels very commonly, and often much bigger systems. So, there was quite a lot of pressure on Prism Audio to build something that would, you know, Incorporate a much higher channel count, but in a relatively small box. 

And what they've done is come up with something they call the Dream ADA128. Which as its name suggests can handle 128 analog inputs and outputs. And digital, you can go up to  384 inputs and outputs, which is just phenomenal all in a 2U rack mounting unit. It's amazing. Fully modular. So you can buy small with just a few input and output cards and then expand it as you may need to.

But the specifications and the build quality are just sublime. It's a beautiful piece of equipment controlled through a touchscreen on the front, or you can connect it to your network and control it from any kind of standard browser. And it's really simple. Channels are rooted in banks of eight. So you pick an input, you.

Choose a destination, press two buttons on the screen and it's done. You can obviously save all the configurations. The really clever thing is that you can have up to four different clocking domains. So you can have four different, completely separate digital connections within your studio, all running on different clocks if you want to.

It's just, it's beautifully done. It's a nice thing. It's expensive. But it meets a particular need in professional high end studios. And I was very impressed by it. Tempted? No, not for me. I don't have anything like that many channels, and I don't want that many channels. I struggle enough with stereo, to be honest, these days.

But I can see it will be very popular in the kind of facilities that, Use that kind of number of channels and in, in multi studio facilities as well, where you might have three or four different production suites and they can all be connected to a common central hub and interface between them and separately and on different clocks and all the rest of it.

It's it's a very powerful thing. Coming back down to financial earth again now.  I've seen a couple of guitar y kind of things,  although not exclusively there's a pedal from Walrus Audio called the Fable, and this is a granular delay,  And I'm a big fan of granular delays, and there are a lot of these things available as plug ins, but some of them have got an awful lot of parameters, and it will be easy to get lost if that was presented in a pedal format.

So what Walrus have done is given you a pedal with a rotary dial that selects the basic algorithm type, and then you've got Other knobs that kind of give you variations on that and it's very hard to get lost and come up with something that's really unmusical So I like that and it also sounds great on synths so people with modular synths, you know You get something really bland put it through this and it'll sound quite exciting and expensive So I like that  the other thing I tried Which I was more than impressed by was the St.

James Amplifier plugin from Blackstar. Now there are lots of amplifier and speaker modelling systems out there, some are very good. Problem with a lot of them is they give you a choice of 150 amplifiers and you've probably Never used 145 of them yourself, so you don't know what they sound like and scrillions of effects So essentially Blackstar have given you two different amplifiers with three voicings each So you've got six different setups and they cover just about everything and likewise with the effects that go with it They've given you just a handful of really what you need well designed hand picked effects that do the job and haven't cluttered it up with lots and lots of weird stuff.

So you can dial in the sound that you want really quickly. It's one of the few amplifier modeling plugins that I've been playing with and thought, yeah, I could really track through this rather than micing up my amplifier. How about you? Something else expensive? No, this is not bad. Actually, this is relatively speaking, this is quite cheap.

You may remember you will remember a few years back we reviewed the Zoom F8. Zoom produce a lot of portable recorders and different qualities and standard levels, and they have handy recorders, the H series and field recorders, which are the F series. And the F series is their kind of flagship product.

And the Zoom F8 was their first eight microphone preamp, eight channel, the stereo mix, a 10 channel recording format, and it's very small and very dinky. And you need to put your fingers and pencil sharpeners before you can push all the buttons. It's that small and tiny, but it's a phenomenally good piece of kit. 

About two or three years after they released the original F8, they produced the F8n in which they improved it in myriad ways. Most of it was based on feedback from users and it was. It was used for little things like the way the battery external battery systems worked, and all sorts of things they added to it.

Last year, they upgraded it again to the F8n Pro, and amusingly, the only difference is that it now records in 32 bit floating point, which is the format that Zoom first introduced with the F6, a six channel recorder,  and it's now on all sorts of their stuff. It's on the Mic Track recorders, it's on pretty much all of the F series recorders now.

And I was just amused that they called it the pro because pros wouldn't actually need to use 32 bit floating point very much. Where it's really, really useful is for amateurs who aren't used to and aren't experienced in and don't understand the requirements of setting headroom when you're recording.

The big advantage of 32 bit floating point is it basically records the entire dynamic range of the preamp from the quietest thing it can record to the loudest thing it can cope with without having to set the gain at all. Anything in that dynamic range is recorded perfectly. And that's obviously a big advantage.

You don't have to sit there fiddling with levels. You don't have to look at the meters, worrying that you're going to clip it, or you're recording too low and it's going to be noisy. It just does it and gets on with it. And that's the only thing that is different between the F8n Pro and the previous F8n, which we did review in the magazine, but it's so useful that I went out and bought the thing because I think it's brilliant.

Ah, you bought one. I bought it. So we didn't actually review it in the magazine, we reviewed its antecedent in the magazine, but I bought it, so it still counts.  Fair enough.  The other thing I was glad to see this year is that Strymon have released two of their pedals as plugins. The Big Sky Reverb has been around for a few years, and it's highly regarded as one of the best reverb pedals you can get.

And they also do a thing called the Deco, which was a pedal to emulate old school Deco. Tape phasing and double tracking and flanging. And they've put both of these into plugins now and the plugins are very elegantly designed so that they've got a simple user interface and they just sound absolutely superb.

So I'm just waiting to see what they put into a plugin next. I like the the big sky. That's a nice plug in that. Just before wrapping up, I should also say that the Line 6 HX1 arrived on my desk about a week before it was released.  Now this is just another HX effects processor, but it's a compact one that produces only one effect at a time, and you might wonder what the use of that is.

But it's great if you've got a pedal board and you just want a kind of wild card effect that you use once in a blue moon. You can have this at the end of your chain of pedals, and it can be a phaser on one song, a Leslie on another song, a compressor on another song. It's rather good. And where it differs from previous HX processors is they've put on a thing called Flux.

It's not a unique concept because Eventide have done something very similar with theirs. But the idea is that you can get a preset and then arrange two different sets of parameter values and morph between them. And in this case, there's a foot switch where you can set the morphing.  speed to morph into the setting and again to morph back to the other setting.

So you could use that for changing Leslie speed to ramp it up or down, or do the same with some other modulation. Or you might want to kick in a bit more drive and at the same time a bit more treble boost for a solo. You can do all kinds of things with it. It's just really nice, really compact, not too expensive, which again is close to my heart,  and very elegantly conceived.

Don't forget, there are lots of other bits of gear of the year which are worth looking at, and in fact all our editors have contributed their own choices, so that will be coming up in the magazine very shortly. So don't miss that, there's a lot of really good stuff in there. Some of it affordable, some incredibly expensive.

Sorry! It's goodbye from me, Paul White, and it's goodbye from Hugh. Goodbye, thanks for listening.  Thank you for listening, and be sure to check out the show notes page for this episode, where you'll find further information along with web links and details of all the other episodes.  Oh, and just before you go, let me point you to the soundonsound.com/podcast website page, where you can explore what's playing on our other channels.