Ultrasonic Lite (and Medium)
TL;DW: Lighter variations on Ultrasonic
Hi! This is just what it says on the tin. Airwindows Ultrasonic is the stacked-up, five-biquad filter that rolls off everything above 20k, so in theory it has no sound of its own. It’s there to work in high sample rate mixes, between plugins that have nonlinearities and don’t have their own filtering (some of mine do, like Console7) and it will clean up the top-end of a digital mix.
But, the original Ultrasonic has SO many stages of filtering that it starts to become audible, softening the highs, and if you used lots of them you’d eat your CPU and would be over-processing.
So, enter Ultrasonic Lite (and Ultrasonic Medium).
These are the same sort of thing, except Ultrasonic Lite has only one stage of filtering, and Ultrasonic Medium has two. They also start a teeny bit higher, on the assumption that if you’re reaching for a Lite version of the filter, you’re looking to not hammer your highs too much. Ultrasonic Medium also subtly staggers the placement of its filters so it has a two-stage roll-off that is hopefully more natural sounding than just doubling up Ultrasonic Lite on its own.
Use these just like you would use Ultrasonic, if there are places in your digital mix where you think you’d benefit from suppressing ultrasonic frequencies. These are not brickwalls: the idea here is that you can sprinkle these throughout your mix, anywhere you like, both before and after things that are nonlinear and distorty. For the strongest possible effect, use the original Ultrasonic… but in places where you don’t need that much help with the ultra-highs, try Medium or Lite and apply a cleaner, subtler filter that lets more of the air through.
If you’ve got something that’s causing an aliasing that will give problems further down the mix chain, and you put Ultrasonic Lite in front of it and the aliasing that would’ve bounced back down to 40k is turned down before it even aliases, making that unwanted 40k quieter… and then there’s another Ultrasonic Lite afterwards and that directly turns down the unwanted, aliasing 40k… then you’ve got a gentle, distributed aliasing suppression across your whole mix, that will really control the tendency of aliasing to just build up and go critical on ya :)
The demo is in a sort of DAW-synth-art thing that has just reached its 1.0 release, Bespoke. It’s waaaaay too much fun. Hope ya like it, because I’ll be doing music streams using it. The name of the streams will be the Airwindows Free Studio… because not only is it futuristic and amazing, but between me and my plugins, Bespoke, Surge, the Full Bucket synths, and OBS itself, now you can be on the cutting edge of modern music creation for FREE, absolutely no restriction, plus for most of those you can have the source code and make your own versions.
Some days the world is a very cool place :)
download 64 Bit Windows VSTs.zip
download Signed M1/Intel Mac AUs.dmg
download Signed M1/Intel Mac VSTs.dmg
download LinuxVSTs.zip
download Retro 32 Bit Windows VSTs.zip
download Retro PPC/32/64 Mac AUs.zip
download Retro PPC/32/64 Mac VSTs.zip
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All this is free and open source under the MIT license, brought to you by my Patreon.
A 1 M zip, Chris? So much bloat!! Just kidding…
Thanks lots, we’re gonna try this out, asap.
Hey Chris! Thanks a lot for those awesome plugins!
Would it help to use Ultrasonic in a 44.1 project? Would it still prevent some aliasing artifacts?