Heat

[Stephen Bond]

There's a plethora of choices for saturation and tape type plugins. Heat looks and sounds nice but personally I'm non HD. Also Avid plugins can be expensive, even second hand eBay bargains considered. With the way that Waves is leading he market with $29 deals for full on plugins it is hard to consider expensive alternatives, especially those for DSP solutions.

Stephen

[Dan IceWood]

except that they sound like ass

[WernerF]

Originally Posted by Dan IceWood

except that they sound like ass

Pretty much agreed. Saturation is a tough thing to get right and I haven't heard any cheap plugin that does it right, for my ears at least.

[TOM@METRO]

Originally Posted by WernerF

Saturation is a tough thing to get right and I haven't heard any cheap plugin that does it right, for my ears at least.

+1 to this.

[Jeezer]

Originally Posted by Dan IceWood

except that they sound like ass

Exactly. Heat is great. Waves are not.

Tell that to waves fanboys and they stick their fingers in their ears (in fact they may already have fingers in ears if they can't hear how bad waves stuff sounds when a/b'd against the competition... eq, compression, tape, sat.. you name it).

Waves do NOT make great analog emulations or saturation algorithms. I'd use almost anything other than waves in fact.

[DonaldM]

Originally Posted by Raoul23

HEAT is awesome, it's subtle but as soon as you turn it off in a mix, your mix just loses something


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

You might say it loses heat....

[WernerF]

Originally Posted by DonaldM

You might say it loses heat....

Yup!!

[ViciousBliss]

Heat can be pretty essential. Sometimes it's the only thing that gives a mix the punch and smoothness it needs. You can't just slap some other plugin across your mix and get something in the ballpark. I've tried. Nor does using something like Phoenix or Tapedesk on all your tracks really do the same thing. In fact, I'm using Heat in addition to Phoenix, Tapedesk, Peacock, Dopamine, or whatever on all my tracks. Avid should really make it available to every version of PT, not just these expensive HD ones.

[moshuajusic]

Putting aside for a moment that Waves objectively, universally, eternally sounds like ass, what is their closest plugin to HEAT? Just going by HEAT's description, I would guess NLS. Amirite?

[LDS]

Originally Posted by jscomposer

Putting aside for a moment that Waves objectively, universally, eternally sounds like ass, what is their closest plugin to HEAT? Just going by HEAT's description, I would guess NLS. Amirite?

Nope. NLS is a console emulation plugin similar to Slate's VCC. HEAT is more tape and tube saturation based. Kramer Master Tape or Cobalt Saphira is more likely to get you into HEAT territory.

HEAT is pretty great. It sounds great, but the way it is implemented into the Pro Tools mixer really streamlines it's application. A little can go a very long way!