Nathan Eames, senior sales and marketing manager at Sonnox:
Sonnox was spun
out of Sony Oxford in 2007. The Sony Oxford group had been
established as an audio R&D lab twenty years earlier, and notably
developed the OXF-R3 digital mixing console for Sony. In the early
2000’s, while the OXF-R3 was becoming a flagship product for Sony,
the designers had the vision to diversify and started to port the DSP
effects—initially the EQ and Dynamics sections—to new platforms
such as Pro Tools. These new plug-ins gave Pro Tools users the same
features and processing quality that made the million dollar OXF-R3
so famous.
This plug-in
business has continued to grow with new products and new supported
platforms such as AAX, with Sonnox now three times the size it was in
2007. With a group of seven designers this growth will continue as we
have a long list of new plug-ins coming soon.
プラグイン市場の中では新しい方のようです。Wavesよりは歴史があるのにプラグインがあまり新しすぎるということになります。
The first two
plug-ins were the Oxford EQ and the Oxford Dynamics, which were taken
directly from the channel strip of the console. If you look at the
consoles, the plug-in GUI is an exact footprint of the EQ in the
dynamics sections of the console. The Dynamics plug-in contains six
modules—gate, compression, expander, limiter, side-chain, and
warmth control—which is great for live, because you only need to
use one insert and you’ve got all these different modules within
one rack space, which is cool.
After releasing
the first two plug-ins, we started branching out from the console and
developing other unique plug-ins for professional mixing. The
Inflator and the TransMod came first, followed by the Reverb,
Limiter, SuprEsser, and others.
The plugins were
received by users: Very, very well. I remember at demonstrations in
the UK people were impressed and saying, “Wow. This is unlike any
other EQ we’ve heard. Somehow it doesn’t sound digital, it’s
not harsh or brittle, it just sounds very transparent and musical.”
Essentially it sounds exactly like the console as it’s the same
algorithm. In fact, [nine-time Grammy winning engineer] Mick Guzauski
had an OXF-R3 console which he obviously knows very well, having
mixed many platinum Sony records on it. He uses the Oxford plug-ins
and finds it hard to tell the difference. I think that’s what sets
Sonnox apart from many other plug-in brands that primarily emulate
existing gear. Don’t get me wrong—they do a fantastic job at it.
There are many great emulations out there of classic hardware. But at
Sonnox, we’re not trying to emulate a piece of classic analog
outboard. They were always digital algorithms, and we’ve just taken
that code and moved it to a different platform. So when you buy an EQ
or a Dynamics plug-in, you’re literally buying the same channel
strip from the original million-dollar console.
Well, that was
quite a fun time creating completely new algorithms. The engineer who
had designed the Oxford EQ and Dynamics—and much of the SSL
G-series channel strip in the 80’s—had been a sound engineer
since the 1970’s and wanted to create the kind of processors that
no hardware was able to provide before. With the Oxford Reverb, we
spent a long time developing it, and in the end came up with a
sonically superior reverb to anything that had come before, because
previously it wasn’t technically possible! There are some amazing
presets in that Reverb, as it also uses an EQ inside the reverb to
color the tail.
The same was true
with Inflator—we set out to create a process that would add
something that you couldn’t get from any other hardware or
software. There are all kinds of exciters and similar effects to add
harmonics, but there’s nothing that quite achieves what Inflator
does to add warmth and presence.
Beyond not
chasing analog emulations, how would you describe Sonnox’s design
philosophy in approaching new plug-in development?
Our design
philosophy, I would say, is to create the highest fidelity audio
plug-ins that sound very clean and transparent—that’s what we’re
known for. What’s interesting is that a lot of people are using
analog emulations in conjunction with our plug-ins. So you’ll quite
often see some classic hardware emulation plug-ins on a channel,
adding some color, and then the Oxford Dynamics plug-in after that to
compress and transparently level a vocal or something.
That’s what we
went for when we designed the SuprEsser. A lot of people, especially
at the professional level, wanted de-essing that you don’t hear.
That’s really the whole point of de-essing, isn’t it? You don’t
want to hear it. You shouldn’t be able to tell that there’s a
de-esser on the channel—it should just be completely transparent
and natural sounding.
How would you
characterize the Oxford Reverb in comparison to other reverbs that
are out there? At the time it was released, convolution was the
flavor. And then we came out with this straightforward stereo, reverb
generator. We felt that you don’t have as much control with a
convolution reverb, where you take an ambience from a room and you
can’t really tweak it and change it too much. With the Oxford
Reverb we wanted to give people complete control to define and create
a space from scratch. You’ve got separate processing paths for
early reflections and reverb tail, and you can blend between the two.
Even though you’re artificially creating space, they sound very
natural and realistic. Another thing that’s great for live with the
Oxford Reverb is that the controls are all sliders rather than knobs,
which is especially useful for engineers using touch screens.
The TransMod—when
did that come out? TransMod has been around a long time—it came out
around 2005. It’s fantastic for hardening or softening attacks.
There are a few transient manipulation-type plug-ins out there, but
TransMod does it in a slightly different way. It gives you a lot of
controls, including how much of the transients you’re kind of
eating into, overshoot, recovery, etc. It can be used creatively too.
In live sound it’s obviously most often used on drums, because
you’re not getting the artifacts of heavily compressing. You’re
just toughening up a snare drum that’s a little bit soft, for
example, and just getting that real edge to it. It’s nice on bass
as well to get real pluck and make it really clear. But you can also
move the slider in the opposite direction and kind of shave off the
original transient. So if it’s a funky guitar that’s bright but
cutting through too much and taking too much attention, and you want
to just round it or soften it down a little bit and just take off the
initial edge, you can do that. You can just back off the transients
on that, so it works both ways.
Inflator—where
does that fit in? There was a sort of incarnation of Inflator in the
console, but the design team then took it a step further. Without
giving away all the secrets, it’s basically harmonic enhancement,
but in a very clever way. Many people would just describe it as some
kind of magical thing that makes everything sound better! It’s very
simple to look out, but with some clever stuff going on behind the
scenes. You can bring things forward and make them more present with
just a touch of Inflator, often without even needing to EQ or
compress. It’s fairly transparent—it does add a little bit of
warmth, but without really adding much color.
To Do Mastering
you need:
•1. A Digital
Audio Workstation {DAW} with a mastering software installed. いいパソコンにAudacityやSSMSやアドビのAuditionなどです。無料ソフトはまったくだめと言っているやつがいますが、僕はそうでもないと思います。Pro Tools | FirstやStudio-One-3-Primeなどもいいのですが、VSTなどで限度があるから使いません。
•2. A pair of
fairly ‘accurate’ speaker monitors (as close to flat response).
•3. An
acoustically ‘conditioned’ room (as accurate as one can get it to
be).
DAW is basically
a computer system with an audio card to capture and to output sound.
Better results can be achieved by adding high quality AD/DA signal
converters, though this benefit comes with a higher price tag; there
are some converters that are a lot more expensive than both the
computer and mastering software put together.