Things nobody needs to know

There are a bunch of "console" emulations which are plug-ins for DAWs (digital audio workstations). The last one I tried was the Waves emulation and I felt that all it did was collapse the stereo field. Which, you know, is sort of the opposite of what they're reputed to do. 

Since forever in the olden days there has been the idea that the 2-mix buss on a classic Neve somehow magically sounds fantastic. But it's very very hard to really A/B test an ITB (in the box) mix vs one that's been done on a big analog mixer, or through an analog "summing mixer." Are they actually things? Historically the answer has been "no." 

But. I've been experimenting. 

Airwindows Console is free and open-source. It's a console plugin, but Airwindows is very low in resource consumption. There are hundreds of plugins that have absurdly simple interfaces but my first set of tests indicates they sound excellent. 

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Surge XT is a free and open source hybrid synthesizer plugin. I haven't tried it yet.

Auto EQ ostensibly gives you EQ suggestions for headphones. 

Analog Obsession is another maker of "donationware" plugins which are kinda cool. 

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From Reddit:

1. Place EveryConsole Plugin as the first plugin on any of my mixing channels(not busses outside of the master) and set it to console0 channel mode,

2. Place EveryConsole Plugin as the last plugin on the master bus, before the limiter, on console0 bus mode,

3. And of course, not touch any of the faders in the DAW.

In any case, I'm experimenting with the Analog Obsession "Konsol" plugin on the opera. I'm using the "black" switch with the transformer on. Do the mixes seem "wider"? Maybe. The null tests show a couple odd things -- one is that for some reason the exports from Samplitude are not sample identical. By that I mean the Konsole version seems to start a few sample later than w/o Konsol. 

The other is that I do get a bunch of spacious reverb when just listening to the null. Is that from the fact that reverbs and other time-based effects cannot null? Maybe. I could pre-render all tracks with reverb first and do tests that way. Who knows? Maybe. 

One problem with these plugins is that they really require using the plugin's own faders for mixing. That's kind of annoying. I've been using Konsol without using the input/output knobs on it. It doesn't null (I just tested without time domain effects.) So it must be something. Is it anything... good? 

Right now? No. Just from listening it feels like the ITB version sounds the best. So I dunno.