Quote:
Originally Posted by
tjoaudio
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It came in this morning and I've had about 2 hours testing it out. Serial number 10 so Im early to the party.
Very happy with it so far, excellent sounding and versatile. Softclipper and the low-end compression is what stands out.
Box tone is quite "neutral" but once you start pushing the soft clipping and output you can get a lot of different colours out of it.
Compression action it self is soft knee (knee changes with the punch button it seems) smooth sound, extremely versatile depending how you set the variable link. Release goes from transparent to almost "EDM" sidechain compression-like pumping. Can shape the groove of your mix nicely.
Its hard to describe the softclipper, its not as "brick wall" as lets say transformer saturation, sounds very fuzzy in a pleasant way. Again depending on how much you apply. If its 2-3db its not very audible while gaining "headroom" would be great before a digital limiter to make it "work less".
These are just my early impressions; I have to spend more time with it.
I have two units which have similar functions on paper - the Neve MBP which can do m/s compression and the SPL Vitalizer mk3 which has a low frequency comp (in parallel) - I’m curious if you’re familiar with either of these units and if you think there’s too much overlap to get a significant unique benefit from the xmax.
The clipper is probably the most attractive function on the xmax to me. I remember reading that it’s an improved circuit taken from the Alpha compressor, and I’ve always liked how that’s sounded. I suppose if there’s too much overlap, some like the FCS Clip/Sat could fill that void.