28Jun/123

Variety Of Sound – Baxter EQ (Review)

In the small world of mastering, « do no harm » is the golden rule. That said, Bootsie (VOF) should not be surprised to hear about mastering engineers being skeptical about the potential of his BaxterEq as a mastering equalizer.

I’m no different of the others; I am very picky about the tools I add to my rack. Until now, very few free plug-ins have made their way through my signal path, especially on the master bus. However, I am glad that few good developers are bold enough to accept the challenge.

On a technical side, Baxter is a 64bit floating point internal processor. More interesting fact, it supports the mid-side treatment. Also, Baxter is ergonomic; it gives easy access to useful controls that help us working the frequency balance in few knob tweaks. Plus, it makes cut filtering very easy; I’ve been able to find the right balance of numerous songs almost instantaneously, thanks to bootsie smart design. Even if it is not able to do perform surgical notches, BaxterEQ has found itself very handy when it comes to finding a right tonal balance.

Unfortunately, free plugins still all have their drawbacks. One huge important detail is missing; a proper mastering equalizer must have a linear phase mode. Low latency mode can be interesting during the mixing process, but it is not a necessity for the mastering process. Like Bob Katz said, when we’ve tried a linear phase equalizer, it’s hard to go back to ordinary one. The good news is that I am still using BaxterEQ after few months, especially for personal projects. However, for external projects, I find myself switching to a more musical (expensive) equalizer once I found the tonal balance I was looking for.

In conclusion, there is no doubt that Bootsie is one of the best free plugin programmers, if not the best, and I encourage him to continue in this way. However, despite its incredible efficiency, the actual version of BaxterEq is not my to-go equalizer for mastering jobs since its phase shifting problem tends to irritate me. Though, I found Baxter very useful for vocal mixing applications. If a linear phase version of BaxterEq comes out one day, you can be sure that this one would be on the top of all my mastering templates. (Overall Rating: 4/5.)

Plus:

  • Ergonomic, practical and useful;
  • Mid-Side treatment;
  • 64bit internal processing;
  • Smooth sound;
  • Low CPU usage and latency.

Minus:

  • Linear phase mode missing;
  • Some bugs related to link channel

 

Resources:

Download link for preset bank from Quantum-Music:

http://www.quantum-music.ca/download/chrisdion-baxter-Preset-bank.rar

Link to Variety of Sound’s blog:

http://varietyofsound.wordpress.com/downloads/

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3 Responses to “Variety Of Sound – Baxter EQ (Review)”

  1. Mathieu says:

    Thanks for the review. I didn’t noticed the phase distorsion until you mentioned it. I hear it clearly now. Thanks for the insights and the preset banks. I should try them this afternoon. Mat

  2. Geoff says:

    Yeah I’ve also noticed the phase-shift thing..

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