Today is a great day for free plugins. Tokyo Dawn Labs has just released their latest VST/AU plugin called “TDR VOS SlickEQ”. I’m lucky to have been involved with the beta testing of this plugin (yes I am very happily biased with Tokyo Dawn since about 15 years now..those who know, know). So I’ve been putting the EQ to work lately.
Let me give you a few quick details and thoughts on the plugin – for the full blast and downloads please head over to Tokyo Dawn.
TDR VOS SlickEQ is a mixing/mastering equalizer designed for ease of use, musical flexibility and impeccable sound.
The plugin is a collaboration with three very talented people: Herbert Goldberg (of Variety of Sound), Fabien Schivre (Tokyo Dawn) and Vladislav Goncharov (Tokyo Dawn/Vldag Sound). You might know these guys previously from plugins like TDR Feedback Compressor, VOS Thrillseeker and Vldag Molot just to mention a few. There’s no need to say this but I’m going to say it anyway: these guys know what they’re doing. Hearing they are putting their great minds together to work on a free plugin was just fantastic news for me, and the results didn’t disappoint (quite the contrary).
The plugin looks simple on the surface but it’s full of cool functionality, such as:
- A clever auto gain function that automatically compensates for changes of perceived loudness during EQ operation.
- Mid/Side/Mono/Stereo operating modes.
- Four distinct EQ models: “American”, “British”, “German” and “Soviet” with optional non-linearity.
- Four output saturation stages: “Linear”, “Silky”, “Mellow” and “Deep”.
- Easy to use A/B comparison feature.
- Support for mouse wheel adjustments (doesn’t sound like much but it’s always a big one for me)
- Advanced 64bit multirate processing scheme that eliminates typical problems of digital EQ implementations such as frequency-warping, quantization distortion and aliasing.
- Clean, user-friendly interface.
In short, no matter wether you are looking at this plugin from the perspective of coding, functionality, sound quality or design and user friendliness – this plugin is top notch. It feels great in use and I am getting good results with it.
For me the guys have just nailed the essence of modern EQ’ing here, simple. And hey, finally we Mac users get our hit of that VOS sound we keep hearing about right? Sweet.
So there you have it. The plugin is available completely free in VST format for Windows and VST + AU formats for Mac. For the full details and specs head on over to the official TDR VOS SlickEQ download page.
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