Everyone loves the sound of vintage audio gear. Locating legacy, studio-grade equipment in good condition can be a challenge. AudioScape Engineering is a company focused on manufacturing modern, faithful recreations of classic analog hardware. Their boutique products are highly regarded and popular with mix engineers. Each unit is an updated recreation of a vintage analog unit, often using “new old stock” (NOS) tubes and components. Their products are handmade in small batches here in Florida.
We can all lust after cool gear, but plugins are a better fit for most budgets, especially if you aren’t an established commercial studio. To best serve that market, Kiive Audio officially partnered with AudioScape to further develop and sell the AudioScape line of plugins.
Kiive Audio just released three new AudioScape-branded products (sold individually or as a Collection): the XL-305R Dual reverb, the Golden 58 Tube Preamp/Saturator, and the V-Comp compressor. The new Kiive versions are updated from the original AudioScape plugins and now include the standard Kiive top bar. This integrates additional features, including in/out/mix level controls, presets, oversampling, stereo width, and a THD (total harmonic distortion) control to dial in more analog-style harmonics. The specific functions on the top bar vary with each plugin. Going forward, AudioScape’s plugins will be marketed and licensed by Kiive and plugin sales through AudioScape will be phased out.
Golden 58 Preamp
The AudioScape Golden 58 Preamp is a 1950s-style preamp. The original hardware used six tubes and four transformers for tone. As a plugin, you’d use this to add drive and saturation. Like many preamp plugins, you’ve got line/mic levels, phase, and left/right linking switches. The Golden 58 includes optimization switches for voice or broadband signals. By default, it opens with auto-gain enabled, so you get very subtle and pleasing changes when you crank up the dials. Of course, you can switch those off and go crazy if you like.
V-Comp
The AudioScape V-Comp is a variable compressor, based on the Gates Sta-Level compressor from the 1950s. This was originally designed for radio broadcast applications to keep program and announcer levels stable as part of the outgoing transmission. As gain increases, so does the amount of compression, hence the “variable” part. By nature there’s a large sweet spot and a soft knee for compression. The actual controls are pretty simple. There’s a modern/vintage switch, which toggles the V-Comp plugin between two different AudioScape models – V-Comp (vintage) and V-Comp+ (modern). This changes the sound quality slightly and adds drive in the modern setting.
In addition to input and output dials, there’s a mode and time setting for compression recovery time. In the mode setting, Off disables the compression circuit, but the rest of the plugin is active for drive and saturation. There are three operating modes. Single uses a slow attack and release time. Double is based on the incoming program content. Triple is a fast attack with a release based on incoming content. Then there’s a recovery speed knob that is active in all three modes. You can use V-Comp on a wide variety of instrument types. It’s very forgiving and smooth, sounds very musical, and is especially nice with vocals.
Since the V-Comp is based on a unit that was originally intended for radio broadcasting, this plug-in is also very useful for video editors working in the various NLE applications. Place it on your dialogue and/or mix tracks to tame your levels. I had previously reviewed Kiive’s Tube-KC1 compressor. Unless you really have golden ears, I think you’ll hear very similar results, regardless of whether you use the V-Comp or the KC1. Therefore, I won’t recommend one over the other. Both are good, so you wouldn’t go wrong using either one.
XL-305R Dual
There are various types of reverbs, from chambers to plates to rooms. One type – spring reverbs – are common in some products, like guitar amps. In a physical spring reverb system, a sound transducer vibrates the internal spring or springs. That resonance is then picked up by a second transducer for the sound of the reverb. Kiive’s AudioScape XL305R is a plugin that emulates a spring reverb unit. The quality of the reverb sounds very pleasing, unlike many other spring reverb plugins, which are known to have more of a “boing” sound.
What’s unique about the XL-305R is that the hardware unit – upon which this plugin is based – is designed as an equally tempered system. In musical tuning, equal temperament means that an octave is mathematically divided into twelve equal parts for the notes in the scale. The original, vintage XL-305 Spring Reverb, developed in 1979, had twelve springs tuned together, making it equally tempered. So the resonance is akin to hearing the subtle vibration of the strings inside of a piano. This software combines the design of AudioScape’s recreation of both the original XL-305 and the newer XL-305R hardware.
The controls for the XL-305R and XL-305 are similar, but with slight sonic differences between the two versions. There are left and right-side controls, which are linked by default. These can be unlinked, as needed. There are input and mix (dry/wet) controls and a four-band equalizer section. You can also switch the return to mono and add mono drive if desired. The main adjustment that impacts the reverb itself is the pre-delay setting on the top bar. Other than pre-delay, adjusting the EQ settings will give you the biggest change in the sound of the reverb. Technically, a spring reverb system is said to have a very synthetic sound, but I found the XL-305R to be very pleasing and prefer it over many other reverb products.
Final thoughts
I’ve reviewed a number of Kiive Audio plugins – most recently their Tube-KC1 compressor and NFuse Bus Processor. I like the fact that their product line-up includes a number of unique offerings that aren’t the same as every other plugin developer. So far, all of the products I’ve tested have been very responsive on my computers, using them in both DAW and NLE applications. As plugins go, these have been very stable and they sound great.
Kiive Audio sent me pre-release versions of these new AudioScape plugins and I’ve had fun testing them on some mixes. You could certainly mix an entire project using only plugins from Kiive and be totally happy with the results.
Plugin developers don’t have licensing deals with each and every hardware manufacturer, so most of the analog emulations you run across can only get close to what the original analog gear sounded like. In this case, it’s an official collaboration between AudioScape Engineering and Kiive Audio, so you can expect these new plugins to sound as faithful to the analog hardware as possible. While I certainly don’t have any of the physical units to compare, I liked what I heard and that’s the important thing.
I would expect that in the future more AudioScape products will be turned into Kiive plugins. If so, we can assume that they will also be accurate software equivalents to this bespoke hardware.
©2024 Oliver Peters
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