Not tested by us, assessed from specs and documented behaviour
A finished-sounding master in thirty seconds, and a chain you can look inside but not rebuild.
How it scored
- Transparency 6.0
Colour is the product. It sounds like a chain, not like nothing.
- Loudness Control 7.5
Competitive level, arrived at by Style rather than by decision.
- Workflow Speed 9.6
Style, input drive, one macro EQ. Best here by a distance.
- Flexibility 3.0
Chain view reaches some parameters. Nothing can be reordered or swapped.
Why we picked it
Best for composers who master their own cues, resent doing it, and are judged on the music rather than the master.
Who should skip it
Skip it if you want to build mastering as a skill, because the ceiling here is fixed at the level of somebody else's chain.
The good
- Released sound in under a minute
- Chain view opens the hood
- Cheapest bundle on this page
The bad
- Chain order cannot be changed
- Modules cannot be swapped out
- Voiced for records, not cues
- Format
- VST/AU/AAX
- Protection
- IK Product Manager
- Chain
- Fixed order, settings editable
- Price
- $99
Why it scored that way
One room's chain, in the order that room uses it. The controls you get are three, and that is the product.
This models the chain used by Gavin Lurssen and Reuben Cohen at their mastering room in Los Angeles. The modelled units are a tube equaliser, a solid state equaliser, two tube limiters, a solid state de-esser and a solid state compressor, running in the order that room runs them. Three controls reach them: an input drive, a five band equaliser on fixed frequencies, and a Push control that nudges those bands together.
The order is the product rather than the processors. Six units of this kind are available from any developer, and what is being sold here is which one comes first and roughly where each sits, which is the part that takes a career to learn rather than an afternoon. Forty Styles configure the whole chain for different kinds of material, and choosing between them is most of the work.
The chain is not the sealed box it is often described as. A Chain view shows the individual modelled units and lets some of their settings be altered and saved back as a custom Style. What it will not do is let you reorder them, remove one, or put a plugin of your own in the middle.
Two things go wrong on orchestral material specifically. The chain was voiced for records, so on a dense cue with low brass it can add mid range weight that was not needed, and the Styles built for rock are actively unhelpful there. It also produces something that sounds released before you have checked whether it is correct, which is a real hazard on a cue that has to serve a picture rather than a playlist.
Price history and lowest recorded price
Check price $99
