Auf GS bringt jemand unsere Debatte super auf den Punkt:
Well, the video is cleverly done, but it doesn't show the actual graphs of the two plugins matching each other's curves. Just a tiny bit of lows or highs can make one sound better than the other, if you know what I mean.
Second thing:
FG-N has harmonic distortion and noise, Gold EQ does not. They explicitly say that they had to engage 'drive' to match a plugin that has just clean FIR curves. That's a little hilarious to me and draws attention towards the mistake. Throw in the Gold Pre and the comparison could get a lot more nuanced.
Third thing: Gold is 5 eqs, 12 preamps, 2 compressors + an incredibly rich featured channel strip with loads of flavours to chose from. FG-N offers just one eq/flavour (and you can't disable the noise on it
). Not really a competitor in any way. That being said, the 073 model in Gold is my least favourite, 122, 093 are by far my favorites on pretty much anything I had the time to try Gold on the past 2 days. Gems.
And fourth thing: this kind of comparisons show something; I know because I've done them myself hundreds of times: you take Gold (or Lime, Pearl etc.), tweak a couple of knobs and everything sounds great. Next step you load another plugin that you attempt to copy that sound with. It can take quite a bit, but in the end you come up with something satisfactory. Obvious conclusion: you can do that with algo plugins and that seems true to some extent.
But after many tests I realized, using many algo plugins I end up in completely different places then when using acustica stuff. I don't say that some are better than the others. But I say that things will sound completely different if you mix with acustica compared to algo plugins. That's simply due to the way Aquas react when moving the knobs. If one looks carefully it's easy to see the boosts on FG-N are much more generous. On Gold you just touch a control and 'boom', the sound is significantly transformed. Also, acustica stuff tends to sound very different than pretty much anything else I use, when pushed towards extremes (kind of like some autogain starts kicking in above a certain point).
In my continuos search for the best combination of sound and usability, I did found some really good algo plugins (which I won't name here), that can bring me there in a similar way, although there's always a certain softness to the general sound of a mix (due to phase response I believe) when IIR algo plugins are used, compared to a kind of enhanced sharpness, openness and separation I witness when using a lot of acustica plugins.Sometimes I prefer that softness, sometimes not, but the difference is there and it is a lot more obvious when multiple tracks are stacked as opposed to single instruments examples which are a lot easier to get closer results. By contrast, when pushed to extremes many algorithmic plugins tend to sound harsh, while acustica ones become softer. I find that very interesting and intriguing.
I prefer and quite enjoy using both technologies, but IMVHO, this kind of comparisons should
never be done publicly by plugin developers. I own and use
VMR (almost all modules),
VCC and
VMS (which I like quite a lot), but this kind of actions are disqualifying, as I said, IMVHO.
To each their own
