ToVinyl3

ToVinyl3  is a universal binary AU plugin to center and accentuate bass, such as you’d do for vinyl mastering or to make an electronic music mix more efficient over a large PA system. You can cut side-channel bass and tighten and control the extreme lows in the middle, with great-sounding Airwindows filters.

Also, ToVinyl 3 includes high frequency limiting—an invisible digital harshness control, catching anything you choose to do in a mix so that the mix intention shines through but translates to all situations (including lossy compression, which suffers when you throw a lot of supersonic highs at it). Try it out! You may be able to dial back other ‘harshness reducers’ and get more sparkle out of your mixes without edginess.

Lastly, ToVinyl 3 comes with a Groove Wear control. If used to do actual vinyl mastering, you should leave this off, but if the target is a digital format (such as Pono…) you might try it. It breaks up the extreme highs in a characteristic way, scrubbing off some of the fizz and focussing the midrange and presence. You can also crank it, for effect (such as on a submix or drum buss). Groove Wear isn’t available anywhere else and a lot of people really like it, so listen carefully to what it does, not just in the highs.

I suggest using ToVinyl after most things on the 2-buss, but before a final clipper. For instance, a very analog-sounding output section might be ToTape, into ToVinyl, into ADClip, into Ditherbox (and perhaps Voxengo SPAN for some terrific metering—I swear by Density Mode).

ToVinyl3 is $50.