I’ve noticed that when I use Tube Stage on an input with an appreciable amount of high frequency content such as a snare or certain vocals, it seems to dull the signal and take the “air” away from the sound. I like what the plugin does in terms of saturation and harmonic content, but I find that I end up turning it off pretty often due to this.
I decided to run a SMAART trace with and without tube stage to confirm what I was hearing, and discovered that there is a fairly significant HF rolloff starting around 4K on most models. All have this rolloff, but some are a little less attenuation and the steepness of the slope also seems to vary with each model. I’ve included screenshots of the SMAART traces of flat, pentode, and triode with the fine adjust knob at noon, for reference.
It would be great if this could be toggled on and off. I know that Tube Stage is a simplified version of Dual Stage Valve, essentially being presets of the latter for lack of a better word, but the flexibility would be appreciated! There’s a HF Lift control on the Dual Stage which I’m assuming does what I’m talking about (but I’m not sure since I don’t own an Avantis/DLive and don’t have time to really mess with it when I am on one) which makes me figure it wouldn’t be too difficult to implement this in a future firmware update. I love the sound of the plugin aside from the missing sparkly bits!
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