Voxengo PHA-979

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*.

In a market saturated by modeled plugins and 'unique concept' plugins, Voxengo continues to maintain a niche right in the middle.  Their plugins are functional, stable, easy to work with and have a natural organic sound.  They are not emulations of 'prized' classic gear, nor are they bloated A.I driven multi-tools with masking meters and fancy 'learn' buttons; they are easy to use affordable problem solving tools that sacrifice nothing in sound quality or euphonics.

The PHA-979 is a an excellent example: it is a phase and time correction plugin - the kind of tool one uses to reduce or eliminate phase cancellation between microphones or other problematic multi-channel sources.

But PHA-979 is not like other phase correction plugins.  For one thing, it is Linear Phase, which means that phase adjustments are equal across the spectrum; LP rotation makes it possible to correct phase cancellations across the frequency spectrum, unlike 'analog' (minimum phase) tools, which typically force a compromise.. (if you still want to use minimum phase correction, PHA will do that too).

Second, it has a time (distance) adjustment included, so you can deal with all your phase issues in one plugin.  It also has a handy calculator that converts samples to milliseconds, and applies the result to the appropriate knob (you can zoom in on two sources in your DAW, determine the number of samples between the two, enter it into the handy calculator and hit 'enter,' and your sources will have the same start time).

And for good measure, PHA comes with an FFT style phase indicator, so you can see which frequencies are in phase, which ones are out and which ones are in between.

PHA-979 is a lifesaver with poorly recorded drum kits; its unique combination of tools and meters greatly reduce the time required to make a kit sound like it was miked up properly in the first place.

I have yet to see another phase correction tool that does linear phase rotation, much less one that is this easy to work with.

Did I mention that it sounds good?

I am so thankful for the tools that you have made.  I am able to achieve control over sound that is simply impossible with "two-knob plugins." They certainly have their place, but I prefer to understand the character of different flavors of sound and mix/transform music with conscious intention, just as songwriters do so when creating their work initially.  Your tools enable me to express what I see/hear in my mind's eye/ ear.