Quantum-Music.ca

To be honest, I’ve never heard of Xenium audio before. Do that means that I was skeptical about this product ? Yes. Do that means it is a bad product ? Absolutely not ! Fortunately, I gave it a try and nowaday, I’m very happy to have this secret weapon in my vst rack !

Overview

It’s a 12AX7 tube emulation, 64 bit floating point internal processing, with possibility of oversampling up to 16 times at zero latency. It can be used to warm your stuff up a bit. The plugin is available both in 32 and 64 bit versions.

Hands on

I tested it on a master, nothing less ! Since I’m one of those who try to avoid A/D conversion when I can, if I can do everything in the box, I’ll do it. I tried the plugin while I was already running at 96kHz with the oversampling set to 4 times and it sounded really natural. I could have closed my eyes and it would have been difficult to tell if I was processing in the analog domain or not.  At such high sampling rate, the difference between digital and high end analog is difficult to differentiate.

Now, the result depends on the quality of the transfer function that has been used to model the original equipment. Personally, I’ve been using an Altec 436C (What a classic !) for about 10 years and this technology uses 12ax7 tubes. I’ve been able to recognize the similarities in the sound, but at the same time, the plugin seemed to sound clearer to me. I have to admit that my old 436C needs maintenance and is becoming very noisy. However, the fact that I found myself using it on many project is a good sign. That means that my subconscious mind found it efficient enough to use it has a go to “warmer”.

Unfortunately, for the moment, at least, no freeware plugin is perfect. On this one, a major drawback overcomes the advantages of using it. I might like it a lot, but this plugin crashes a lot too. It also make sense since it runs at 16 times oversampled without latency, but still, this is not an excuse. Also, it happened that I could not reload the plugin properly when I was opening a previous file. Other uncertainty, the plugin has sometimes weird effect in the stereo field.

In conclusion, this is a very nice sounding plugin that, unfortunately, still has bugs. However, the fact that you can oversample ridiculously make it sounds very analog and natural, especially when your base sampling rate is 96kHz. (Overall rating: 4.1/5)

PLUS:

• Crazy oversampling
• No latency
• Smooth natural sounding
• A lot of parameters tunable for a simple plugin
• Very useful, simply…

 

Resources:

Download link on xenium audio website:

http://www.xeniumaudio.com/downloads.php#XTube

 

Tags: Freeware, harmonic content, Mastering, Mixing, plugins, Quantum-music

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 4th, 2012 at 8:00 pm and is filed under Freeware Plugin Review, Mastering, Plugin Development. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.