Console3

Console3Demo is the latest Airwindows digital mix buss replacement. That’s right: replacement. It’s not an emulation of anything in particular, it’s not a coat of sonic paint to slap on weak digital recordings, in fact it tries its best to have NO sound of its own and none of the tones you put through it should sound any different.

So what’s the deal? Soundstage depth, sonic dimensionality, 3-D audio. That’s what. After two years of development it’s finally possible to update Airwindows Console.

If you want details on how it works, there’s a write-up on the Console2 post. You’re probably more interested in what’s new, and how it was improved.

Console3 is using the expanded word length introduced in the popular saturation plugin, PurestDrive. It does everything at ‘ludicrous resolution’, an 80 bit internal buss, and noise shapes the result to the CoreAudio buss. It was already a 64 bit internal buss. Seems people like what it sounds like when I push that even farther. Console3 is totally 80 bit resolution for its processing, like PurestDrive is.

Console3 also builds on a quality earlier Console versions had: opening out the clarity and transparency of the sound. It’s doing it through applying the Console process to audio near the Nyquist frequency. That is sample-rate dependent, so if you’re running 44.1K it might be more obvious, and if you’re at 96K or 192K you are basically ‘analogifying’ those beyond-air, ‘angels fly in the sky, I can fly twice as high, reading rainbow’ frequencies. In other words, I think at 96K you already have all the transparency and changes up there won’t be noticeable. But then I didn’t think PurestDrive was going to take off, either, so what do I know? Maybe running Console3 at 96K or 192K will be the latest in beyond-analog mix sonics.

It’s new, it’s literally everything I’ve been developing over the last couple years, it’s letting the DAW compete directly with large format analog consoles sonically instead of just trying to imitate them—and since it builds on a line of already successful plugins, there’s a lot of existing Console users who’re getting it for free. So… time to try and reach people who didn’t hear about it the first or second times around!

Console3 is $50.