Bought instantly purely because of the loyalty discount, plugin companies that care and give back to their longtime customers means I continue to give back to them aswell. It's a win-win for both, this should be standard practice imo.

It also motivates more people to jump on board who haven't bought any of your plugins yet to join to get the loyalty discounts in future. To the other plugin companies that don't honor any loyalty discounts for longtime customers (You're gonna get left in the dust)

Great plugin as always MB!

Had a quick test last night. Too bad i have to go on vacation next week i can't test it more. Poor me.

This one of the most interesting sounding plugins in a long while.
Quite literally every part of the plugin sounds nothing like i could compare it to.
This might be placebo, but the mid boost band seem to be doing some voodoo other EQ's don't. Like it has a VERY firm hard sound, but in a really good way.

The modern compressor is magic. I love how crazy fast the times are, and it keeps being musical on stupid pushed settings. Has a rubbery sound. My favourite trick was to slam the shit out of drums with one of the faster settings, and dialing the DEPTH back, where it just lights on the louder hits. That way you can keep the slammed attack, and squishy goodness, but the dynamic range is back without excess pumping. Combine that with some EQ pushes, and you have an insanely useful, full of character design tool.

When i read about it being a vintage console, i was expecting a vintage sound, but to my ears it strangely does not. I really can't put the sonics anywhere, (which is a good thing).
Only thing i can compare it to is LSD. Like swimming in a synthetic rainbow. Digital from the other side.

Only thing i instantly didn't like is the gain staging.
I love that there is an OD mode, but it starts way to heavy, and the Mic does not go far enough.
So there is a big gap of untapped input gain range between too subtle and too distorted, and needs an extra gain knob before, to fully exploit. I have no idea how the real console sounds, but the overdrive sounds much more digitalesque than what i would expect from an old desk. It does have that "metric halo" shine though.

That's also the case with Mixhead. That needs to be addressed, then also for this plugin .

So, the O/D and Mic have very different distortion characteristics. Even if you drive Mic much harder (e.g. with more gain in front of the plugin) it is never going to get to the backed-off O/D. The backed off O/D probably gets closer to Mic - but still I doubt they will ever really overlap.

The O/D mode was a result of noticing that high-level signals driven into the Mic Pre with low gain settings had a very, very different signature than low-level signals gained up to the same level (the Mic Pre with low level input and high gain was quite clean, whereas with high-level input and low gain it was much more distorted, and much more prone to clipping).

We talked to the last owner of the Console about that and he confirmed that indeed that's the way it behaved for him and that he utilized it as an effects processor (e.g. for guitar and for things like drums with high-output mics). He also confirmed that the O/D mode (suitably adjusted) sounded very similar to what he remembered from the console when he used it in that way.

We debated whether or not to drop the overall gain into the O/D process or not, but in the end decided that it was better for it to reflect the way it was used. So you may want to pull back the trim before switching to O/D and then bring the gain up until it hits point you are looking for.

I have their Sontec eq and didn't get any loyalty voucher.

Send us an email to sales at mhlabs.com and we'll get it sorted out for you (also check your spam folder).

Thank you so much for the kind words

For anyone with a SSL UC1 controller, like me, I had no problems mapping most of the controls of the MBSI, including most of the buttons. A couple of buttons I didn't really find a natural way to map, like the line/mic/OD button, but it's not uncommon with SSL 360 Link. Sometimes you have to reach for the mouse.

I'll need a couple of days to find out what it can do for me, soundwise.

I’ve reduced my toolkit severely centering around p422 and Sunglow as my “analog vibe” tools but I have to at least give this a try and compare!

Thanks for the report. Does UC1's new plugin mapping allow the gain reduction, gate, and i/o meters on the hardware to function with any third party plugins yet, or only the UC1 strips from SSL?

Everything on this sounds great.

I was looking for a channel strip to track with, and I think this is a good candidate.

If only it had one more mid band.

About to give this one a try, sure it won't take long for the card to come out though.

G

If you would like to hear the story about the MBSI you can watch this

https://youtu.be/PRvdtMM3Y0g?si=-MaURikfY6hYnh8E

Hi, thanks for being here.
I would like to know what the minimum Mac OS requirements are.

Any os that can run 64 bit!

Congrats on the release, looking forward to giving it a try.

Couple questions -
1. Is the sound of the OG console the totality of the channels and is that “summing” reflected by instantiating MBSI on each channel whether the effects are being used or not?

2. Will there be a DSP version of this because yeah baby building out the 80 bit MIO with these recent plugs really gets me going!?

This is definitely good for making stuff sound nice, quickly. I 'll probably cave.

Is the CPU footprint for this one in line with other MH/MB plugins (aka very efficient)?

Thanks in advance

Absolutely is!!!

Yes every plugin we release will be in MIO eventually.

Thanks for checking it out!

my pleasure!

What's up with the scribble strip? it just says 13 on every instance over here. Can it auto take track names? That would be extremely useful.

the scribble strip is for Bill's (BS) presets only. There will be random quotes that will populate the scribble strip every time you load one of his presets. This is a throw back to when bill used to etch saying into the master's on some of the biggest records in the world!

We'll keep that in mind! Thanks for checking it out.

Is it possible that the button, or markings for the bell curve slope are backward? All the other buttons work as expected but, according to plug-in doctor, when I think it’s going to be narrow, it’s wide, and vice versa.

I used it on bass, drums, acoustic, and a lead in a composition and really liked it! Maybe it was placebo but it yielded an extremely 70’s sound in my opinion.

Did I hear correctly that the comp in modern mode was not in the original? I’ll test later but is it pre or post eq? Since you have access to the Hotel California man, can you ask him what compression he might’ve used in that era, and would it typically have been pre or post.

I will likely purchase this vibe machine!

We will be dropping a video tomorrow that is an interview with Bill where he will answer that question for you!!

The q adjust is actually more of frequency shift, that’s how it was on the original console and we wanted to keep it that way,

Compressor is post!

Also the compressor has the same distortion characteristics as the gate (supres.) does!

Amazing sound, terrible workflow. And what's up with the tall, ugly fader? Anyway, I really wish someone could just help MB and MH with their uis, that would make them a top 3 dev.

There’s absolutely nothing wrong with the workflow, it’s a great plugin.

Tops in my book 📕 UAD Softube MH And others

Yes! This is an incredible plugin! Thanks!

We feel the work flow is pretty smooth considering how spread out the modules are from each other on the real board. I like our solution as does Bill and others who have worked on this board.