Average is a utility plugin for filtering. It averages adjacent samples, and adds the remaining fraction as a ‘leftover’ sample so you can smoothly fade between values. It uses all the Airwindows audio tricks like noise shaping to the 32-bit floating point buss, to be the best-sounding moving average you could possibly have! Truly an audiophile moving average, inspired by the need to preview Pono moving-average playback processing.
If you look at the output of this plugin in Voxengo Span (or whatever metering program you prefer), you can clearly see that the frequency behavior of this form of EQ is odd. There are extreme, obvious notches in the response. Two things about that: first, that’s sweepable in this plugin and my design lets you dial the notch in to a specific frequency if that helps you do what you’re doing. Second, I’m not convinced that is a fault, just an observed behavior of this type of filter.
By that, I mean that type of response is very similar to acoustic comb filtering. My idea here is that our ears can pick out time domain issues as problems, we seem to be able to hear quantization issues at least part of the time, but all day long we are hearing sounds with comb filtering, and tuning out those problems. I think our ears are designed to make light of comb filtering issues and these sorts of notches and response problems, and for that reason I think moving average lowpasses sound better than ‘they should’.
Hence, I’ll call this freebie ‘audiophile’ because I think its filtering sounds awesome. I’m aware it measures strangely, but I don’t associate those response irregularities with ‘terrible unnatural sound’. Rather, it mimicks nearly all natural sounds heard in real environments, and deserves to be a more common EQ tool.
