I've always been of the opinion that show is better than tell so Robb and I will be collaborating on a track that was produced and performed by my friends Habish Rosario and Hector StoneTape Hernandez. Its an indie style song with a ton of weird guitar sounds, moogs, assorted synth sounds, drums, bass and vocals. I will be mixing it with basically a Pulsar modular console (P42 followed by P440 and rounding it out with P11) followed by my usual UAD tape machines etc.
There are other things that are used in the mix (basically "outboard" to the PM console) but the lion's share of the work and more importantly the tone of the mix comes from the PM set up. Robb will then master it using the P440 so that it's easier to appreciate what this brings to the table on different applications (mixing/mastering). Both the mastered and unmastered versions will be posted to properly illustrate what was done where.
What that combo feels like to me is what mixing on a high voltage, high headroom class A console would feel like. Meaning that there is this feeling of endless headroom and every sound it produces feels very solid without feeling "hard" (solid smoothness?). Like Robb said in his post, this isn't a surgical eq but within a certain range it does a rather unique trick.
It can delete (within reason) an offending frequency like it was never there without affecting nearby material. It's not a notch...more like an eraser. Something that has driven me a little nuts with this is that because it is so smooth when boosting or cutting (and I've gotten really used to that smoothness) when I go back to something like CLARO I can clearly hear the edges of the filters ringing in a way that had never pulled my attention before, even when just cutting.
At one point I thought there was something wrong with my hearing but no, the ringing was always there, I am just way more aware of it now. The Kirchhoff seems to be smoother and because I use it primarily as a dynamic EQ I don't get the same type of ringing sound that now bothers me. Added bonus of the entire PM line is that I found myself laughing out loud when I looked at a fully loaded 35 channel mix running at 96k with everything active and my CPU read 23%. As someone who's used to having to deal with Acustica CPU consumption (and all the associated freezing/unfreezing) this was literally hilarious to me in the best possible way.
This may be billed as a mastering eq but it is so much more than that. There are several controls that are unique to this that are a joy to use (this will be a surprise for later as I'm not at liberty to discuss them yet) but I honestly think that everyone will love this thing. I'm still astounded how much of the thousands of dollars worth of software I've invested in over the years I simply don't use anymore. YMMV and all that but I honestly cannot imagine anyone being disappointed with this.
Stay tuned to this space and have a great weekend everyone