Sonnox Elite Native review – Inflator & Transient Modulator
By Paul Dakeyne
| Posted in Music Technology
The Sonnox Elite Native plug-in pack contains seven high-end, well established pedigree processors, previously enjoyed exclusively by owners of HD systems and in TDM format. Their transition from being named Sony Oxford to Sonnox and the porting over to VST (Windows) and AU/RTAS (Mac) has seen these expressive and powerful sonic sculptors gain more mainstream recognition – especially as the manufacturer allows a pick and mix philosophy and time limited trial download/usage.
Today, I’m looking at two of the group of seven plug-ins and kicking off with the very creative cousins that are ‘Inflator‘ and ‘Transient Modulator‘. Inflator is at its core a limiter, but not just any ol’ limiter y’all. It enhances perceived loudness in a ‘musical’ way that I’ve never heard on any other plug-in of this type. The voodoo magic comes from a Sonnox algorithm that brings up the quieter parts within an audio file in a way that normal limiting/brickwall compressors don’t achieve.
It certainly works at its best on the stereo output bus and gives a more musical, intelligent maximisation of the source whilst still keeping the dynamic relationship of peaks to troughs intact. Controlling the input then adding the effect at 100% are basic settings I’d recommend. From here, you can simply fade up the ‘curve’ control (which probably should start at the halfway mark) and push it further up to give a warmer (and never unpleasant) analogue enhancement to the output effect. Here at DV247 and on my own DJ web-page too, I explained how much I use Inflator when mastering old vinyl to digital file formats. The beauty of this is that a track from 1995, for example, will, once ‘inflated’, maintain it’s true dynamic identity whilst simultaneously maintaining a feel of greatly increased loudness that works with the available dynamics, not smashing them face forward into a brick-wall.
Sonnox Elite Native‘s ‘Transient Modulator’ is next under the looking glass. This plug-in has another unique way of dealing with signal transients in that it can target and accentuate peaks to make them more prominent, or more transparent by minimising them into the mix. Transmod’s ratio fader dials in its attention to emphasising drum transients at a +1 maximum setting (without increasing any room ambience present), and significantly suppressing them at -1. Both these alterations are done without damage to the inherent nature of the source sound.
Using the ‘threshold’ and ‘deadband’ dials, the user can control at what level the plug-in starts to do its job in the onset and ‘dB’ range areas. The overshoot control allows pinpointing the plug-ins effectiveness to accentuate (or reduce) transients for a shorter or longer time. This allows the user to fine-tune the action to the actual source material and obtain the desired effect. The final prominent adjustment of ‘overdrive’ seems to give some kind of harmonic adjustment to the output signal which, to my ears, makes the sound much more alive when pushing from the halfway level upwards.
TransMod works equally well with acoustic drum loops as it does with more electronic sounding ones. It can provide some interesting results on sound files that rely less heavily on accentuated percussives but still have enough transient content to be worked with nonetheless. I’d add a small note of due care here though: when applying significant processing curves with TransMod, be careful to turn your monitors down a touch when hitting ‘play’ on your DAW – it can hit the track back in with an unpleasant little dB spike from a cold start.
As just two of the seven plug-ins within Sonnox Elite Native, both TransMod and Inflator really do encourage some quite radical sonic experimentation from the user. I’d suggest however, that because they are such unique tools with unfamiliar control sections, a quick read through the manual is useful and will endow basic feature knowledge: from thereon, it’s fun, games and creative doodling all the way.
Tags: elite, inflator, native, plug-in, sonnox, transmod