Waves Renaissance Maxx help / comments?

[rfstudio]

Hi All,

So I have narrowed down my next purchase to either the Mcdsp project studio or waves Renaissance Maxx. I have been using the Mcdsp demo and they are fantastic. I wish I had the money to buy the full blown product.

I was looking at the Channelstrip plugin but it is out of the running.

Regarding the waves stuff...I have gone through the incredibly painful process of trying to get the demo going. I created an account, loaded the auth enabler. However, even though my account information says the product is active I get the expired warning from the plugins. ALso, there doesn't appear to be any tech support unless I pay for WUP????

So, has anyone else run into this?

Am I wasting my time looking at the these particular Waves plugs? Finally do I care about WUP? Seems like another way to take money out of my pocket for nothing.

any comments appreciated,
Rick

iMac 2Ghz 2G mem
PT 7.1.1
10.4.8

[Phil Ogden]

I would think you'd get 12 month's WUP with a Waves purchase (I did with Gold). If you don't renew the WUP, you are indeed out on you're own.

You do, however, get any updates or new plugs added to the bundle for free whilst WUP is active. Whether it's worth the money to renew is debatable.

[rfstudio]

Thanks Phil.

As far as quality of the waves stuff, what is your thoughts?

thanks,
Rick

[Phil Ogden]

Personally, I like Waves stuff and can't think of a session where I haven't used at least one or more plugs. Getting good sonic results is quick and easy as the GUI are fairly intuitive.

WaveArts and Massey are also worth trying if you're on a budget. Not quite up there with Waves and McDSP but plenty of "bang for your buck".

[sleepingtiger]

Run away from Waves as fast as you can. The WUP policy is exactly as you describe it. Every year I get billed again for something that I paid too much for in the first place. I let it lapse once only to get caught at one of the Pro Tools updates. I had to pay about a third of the list price to be able to continue to use the bundle with Pro Tools 7. This was only about two and a half years after I purchased the bundle. The plug-ins are fine but these days they're nothing special and I don't know of any other vendor that has such an awful policy. Please feel free to learn from my mistake...

All the best,

[hmorovic]

I can only agree with sleepingtiger: I own the REN Maxx, Musicians and Masters Bundles, and as today my WUP for the three products is US$ 387.

From a quality point of view, I find the MCDSP Studio Project far superior than Waves (althought that could be personal taste). The only Waves software I really use is the L2 Limiter (Masters Bundle) but because I will be upgrading my system, I'll definitly go with the Sonnox Limiter... and I will be free from Waves!!!

(Well, so to speak, because you should know that if you want to sell your Waves unused software you have pay your WUP in order to do that...otherwise you can't transfere your iLoks licences to the buyer...!!!)

Hope this helps,

H.

[bigdoghat]

Have you checked out sonalksis plugins? Demos are easy to get and use. I got the multiband compressor demo to fix a carelessly recorded acoustic guitar that was very 'woofy' and it did a stellar job - I was really, really impressed. Maybe worth checking out their eq's/compressor if you haven't already? But much more an analog sound than the waves stuff. Re Renaissance: I have the Renaissance bundle and definitely like it - compressor is transparent, eq carves out sounds well, de-esser is very good. I find the renaissance verb a bit heavy-handed, I used to have Trueverb on OS9 and found that a bit more natural sounding. I never use the channel strip, the whole window is just so crammed with controls it's really hard to get around on quickly - I find it much easier to use a separate compressor and eq on the channel. But I got stuck paying for the WUP and was fairly bummed out about that too. I keep wondering if I'm going to get hit again if I go up to Leopard eventually.

www.sonalksis.com]http://www.sonalksis.com