When I see countless people gush over this NLS vst I wonder if people are actually LISTENING to what it does. I myself saw it on some youtube video, drank the Kool-Aid and started putting it on every track, selecting different modeling channels for every track, using a “Nevo” preset I made with some drive and gain compensation. Then I got some more expensive headphones and a headphone amp to power them… guess what I heard?
This NLS thing causes CRAZY distortion on about 40% of anything you put it on, artifacting the audio… even with the drive all the way down. On bass… forget about it, 90% of the time you will have undesired distortion… right now I writing this because a simple pad sound I’m dialing in CAN NOT have the NLS on it without crazy over modulation sound in the audio when the pad hits resonant peaks. WHAT GIVES? How am I seemingly the only one who notices this?
Interesting point. I run my sessions at 96k and have less in the way of artefacts, especially since I don’t drive these hard. You also have to keep in mind this was designed like 15 or so years ago, standards and computer capability were different back then.
You also have to consider there were also some idiosyncrasies that came with these consoles. They tried to be super transparent but tat the time they were created technology was limited. You only have to turn them on to experience their non-linear characteristics.
So naturally these plugins create a sound just by being on, if you want to drive the circuit harder then that is what the control is for. They’re not transparent.It does what it’s supposed to do, iand will also introduce subtle channel variations if you want it too, which is really their strength. If I want distortion personally I’ll load in plug-in that’s specifically designed for that, BB Tubes, for example.
Nonetheless, I’ve been lobbying to allow people to choose their oversample rate for quite some time now. It’s a very common thing now to make that the user choice. The tradeoffs, therefore, also become the responsibility of the user.