In this video review, Production Expert team member Kevin Becka puts the Wavesfactory Spectre plug-in through its paces. This unique processor introduces sophisticated harmonic content to your tracks ranging from chocolatey tones to outright bit-crushing anarchy.

Not Your Average Processor

There are plenty of traditional EQs, distortion modeling simulators, and other flavor enhancers in the plug-in world, but Spectre is not one of them. Instead, this new plug-in starts as a five-band EQ, then extracts the difference between this signal and the dry input and pushes it through one of the eight saturation algorithms. The process results in infinitely variable ranges of tone that can be added to mono or stereo tracks, left or right only, and mid or side only. 

Parallel Mix Controls and More

At the bottom of the plug-in, Spectre offers Input, Output, and Mix controls to blend the processed and unprocessed signals. Next, there are three choices of quality, Good, Better, and Best. The tonal characteristics of these choices are based on oversampling within the plug-in. This tidies up the audible range by increasing the bandwidth of the sampled signal. Next comes the choice of saturation algorithm whose names such as Tube, Warm Tube, Solid, Digital, and others roughly describe their character. There is also a full list of presets to get you started or you can create and save your own from the Presets menu. Once you dial in a preset, you can choose one of three levels of intensity including Subtle, Medium, or Aggressive. Lastly, you can choose to use Spectre in mono, stereo, stereo left or stereo right, or in M/S mode processing either mid, or side. 

You can find out more about Spectre at the Wavesfactory website.