Voxengo Elephant

In a market bloated with 'emulations' of classic gear, it's rare to find juicy sounding plugins that capture the best qualities of 'classic', offer some flexibility and don't break the bank.  In the universe of more tweakable plugins, here too only a few offerings stand out.

After years of working with hundreds of plugins from numerous companies, I've found only a handful of offerings that keep me coming back.  One of those companies that still hold a top spot is Voxengo.  Their plugins are 'analog' without being slavishly limited to a given hardware model; flexible but not overloaded with 'feature bloat'; affordable without sacrificing sound quality; and have excellent & consistent GUIs to work with.  A winning combination.

There is definitely a place for well designed emulations of classic gear, but when you require some flexibility and/or modernity, Voxengo is great choice.  Their uniform GUIs also promote actually listening to the music!

Voxengo also has an easy robust activation system (no dongles), exceptional reliability (I've never had a Voxengo plugin crash my DAW in 14 years) and full 64 bit floating point processing*.

The Voxengo guys really have struck the right balance here between controls and automation so that, with very few tweaks and a little foreward planning, results are coming in fast.  And they are good results!

I bought Elephant during the final mastering stage of our latest album, to add those few extra dBs for punch and playability, and this little plugin with its intuitive interface did just that, and did it well.  The transparancy up to +3dB gain is excellent provided the appropriate limiting algorhithm is pushed into action.

There may be even more accomplished limiters out there.  But they probably cost multiples of what this baby retails for.  For the money, nothing beats it.

You´ve got great plugins.  Smart, good looking, sophistique, clear to use, low CPU...etc. but first of all - they got unique style.  Dont´start "copy" any classic effects, tape machines, or just anything.  Just keep your own style and way to make plugins, there is so many copymakers in the business...

All the best for the New Year 2018!

regards,