Audified announces the availability of U78 Saturator — saturation effects plugin.
Utilizing models of the analog circuitry central to the U73b, the vintage German broadcast compressor/limiter, and offering tube saturation circuitry with high-pass and low-pass filters and a unique tone filter.
Boris Carloff, a Czech Republic producer who just so happens to ‘moonlight’ as a product designer for Audified, says: “I was always crazy about the sound of the U73b. I like this unit — great saturation, but there are situations when I need more saturation and distortion. This is why I came up with the idea of the U78.”
Implementing that idea involved removing the U73b’s compression function. Filters were added — HiPass sets the cutoff frequency of the high-pass filter, which comes before the saturation circuit in the signal path, ranging between 30 to 800 Hz; LowPass sets the cutoff frequency of the lowpass filter, which also comes before the saturation circuit, ranging between 1 to 8 kHz — alongside a tone control to dial in (or out) the tone filter, with lower settings producing dark sounds with more low frequency content while higher settings result in bright sounds.
Finally, a gain control adjusts the input gain of the saturation circuit — the higher the settings, the more rich the sound that can be achieved — and effectively completes the U78 Saturator sound… to Boris Carloff’s satisfaction.
The U78 Saturator’s GUI implementation is similar to that of its recently released U73b compressor sibling. The two plugins even share some more mission critical features.
For example, the power and calibration module is identical when taken at face value with an on/off switch (to toggle between processing and bypassed states) and a -9dB default calibration setting with an added value mechanism. Moreover, the software model works with real voltages that are the same as those found in the original hardware circuitry (related to the dBu scale), but the DSP in DAWs works with dBFS (Decibels relative to full scale) so users can (carefully) set the calibration (to work within the correct operational range of U78 Saturator’s saturation effect).
Elsewhere, in the level control module, mix controls the dry and wet signal ratio with the dry signal only delayed to match the wet signal path latency to prevent phasing issues, while output adjusts the output gain of the whole effect and can be adjusted automatically when auto is switched to on (thereby retaining approximately the same loudness whenever the input gain parameter is changed).
“I can’t wait to see what these guys come up with next,” notes the Grammy-nominated producer, Baby Brown. “This one’s now in my toolbox… they’re not getting it back.”
