johnny h wrote:Exactly, "solid", which means functional, mediocre and unspectacular.
It only means that if those are the adjectives you choose to illustrate it.
There *are* some unspectacular and mediocre ones, and some great ones, as I already mentioned in my "vague" post (what do you want, an individual product catalog with my personal views on every plugin they've ever made?)
johnny h wrote:Unfortunately these "solid" plug-ins are sold at extraordinary prices and come with obscene usage and upgrading policies.
Their prices are on the high side, because they like to market themselves for professionals rather than the "I refuse to pay more than £20 for my DAW" entitlement generation that whine and moan whenever they can't afford something.
But that doesn't mean they are all like this - for example, I bought the Musicians Bundle 2, specifically because the Renaissance Comps are good sounding and functional, and Doubler is great without a decent alternative. The EQ's are Ok, and Supertap I don't use as it's imo a pretty boring bland plugin. But for essentially a hundred quid, I got the RenComp and RenVox, Doubler, the RenEQ's, SuperTap and RenAxe, and I consider that a pretty good deal. Then, the ren comps were for me much better sounding and simpler to use than Logic's compressor, and I bought them specifically as a replacement for the UAD compressors which I lost due to moving to a laptop.
When I upgraded my machine and had to generate a new auth because they had moved away from disk authorisation, even though I was out of WUP Waves did generate me new authorisations, and I paid the £20 later on for WUP when needing to update the plugins for a new OS.
Less than I've had to pay for other PPC->Intel upgrades, or new OS versions. That's not really "obscene", at least in my case. Of course I'm not a massive bundle owner, but it seems $200 for a $4K bundle is not really obscene. Heck if you want a one time ProSupport phone call with Apple about ProApps it costs nearly that. For *one* phone call. (That *is* what I call obscene... ( ! )).
Their new plugins, like the CLA series, are very good and certainly "up there" in terms of modelling and good sounding DSP. Don't right them off as "bad" simply because you have a bias against the company.
However, I much prefer the attitudes of some other, more customer-focused companies and prefer to invest my money elsewhere these days. But if an individual likes Waves products, and knows the implications of WUP and what they are buying into and still want to buy them, I can't say they are a "bad" choice, because politics aside, while not every product they make is a knockout, they do have some great products still.