Injecting Some Analog Flavor Into the Digital Sound

    Hi Everyone,


    I had a bit of an "a-ha" moment the other day that I figured I would share with everyone.


    My goal was to attempt to "fatten" up the digital signal of the Virus TI (I'm utilizing Audio over USB), ideally by injecting a bit of analog flavor. While I found that a plugin such as SoundToys' Decapitator (a personal favorite of mine) definitely added punch, it still wasn't what I was after. After conversing with some colleagues, I found out a lot of them utilized outboard gear whether it be saturators or pre-amps in both rack and 500-series flavors.


    Rather than succumbing to GAS, I remembered that I was already in possession of some top notch preamps–the inputs of my Apogee Quartet!


    After chatting with Apogee Tech and receiving the green light, here's what I did (note: this was done in Logic but can be done in nearly in DAW. You must have an audio interface with multi-outputs and inputs):

    • Ensure your Virus is setup for Audio over USB.
    • Create an Instrument Channel Strip and insert Virus Control plugin. We'll call this Virus Channel Strip.
    • Assign Virus Channel Strip it's own independent output. In my case, I assigned it to Output 3-4 of my Quartet hardware (Output 1-2 is the main stereo output).
    • Connect Output 3-4 on Quartet hardware to Input 3-4 on Quartet hardware via TRS cables.
    • In Logic, I created a new, blank Audio Channel Strip and set the channel's input to Quartet Input 1-2 and the channel's output to Output 1-2 (Stereo Mix).Set to live monitor input/record enabled.

    I'm not sure why I never thought of this approach until now, but the results were fantastic. By keeping VIrus' signal as digital audio via Audio over USB rather than the Virus' analog outs, we're going D>A A>D, allowing the signal to be run through the lovely Preamps of the Quartet and adding a bit of "thickness" to the Virus' audio signal.


    Hopefully this will inspire others to experiment.


    Cheers,
    Craig


    P.S. For those wondering, I have my Virus connected via Thunderbolt to USB adapter and the adapter is plugged into my OWC Thunderbolt Dock. Works flawlessly.

    iMac 5K (Late 2014, i7 24GB RAM) | OSX 10.10.5 | Virus TI | KIWI-106 | Logic 10.2 | Ableton 9.5 Suite | Kontrol S49 | Apogee Quartet

    Forgot about this thread! It turned out that my Emu 0404 would no longer work with Windows 10, so I just bought a Steinberg UR-22. I'll do a comparison of the TI analog outs to running through the Steiny/Yamaha pre-amps and see how that sounds.


    P.S: Have recently been doing a lot of bass and arp comparisons between my TI, OP-X Pro 2 and MiniMonsta and I still prefer the TI for tighter sounds and OP-X for others. The in-built Saturator in Ableton Live is also quite nice for fattening up the TI, when you want something in-between.


    Cheers,


    EG