Signal Processors

There's already a decent range of products providing digital emulations of vintage guitar amps, but iZotope's Direct X plug-in goes a lot further, offering no fewer than seven processing modules, and is intended to model every kind of distortion you'll ever need.

Convolving reverbs are coming down in price as more manufacturers make their own. We check out Emagic's new plug-in, which is one of the more affordable ones around, but still allows you to create your own reverbs from favourite spaces.

TC's plug-in powerhouse is now available as an external Firewire-connected rack unit.

The latest plug-in for the TC Powercore card allows you to extract frequency responses from commercial tracks and apply them to your own mixes.

This plug-in produces essentially the same results as its analogue rackmount counterparts, so if you already know and like the BBE process, you should take no convincing.

Voxengo's Curve EQ is a 'linear phase spline equaliser' with a 2048-point filter kernel, which lets you draw highly complex responses using its graphic interface.

Although most major MIDI + Audio sequencing applications include bundled EQ, dynamics and reverb plug-ins, they don't always sound too great, so many users are on the lookout for alternatives, like these two from Wave Arts.