BILL HOLLAND: Welcome back to Gearwire.Com. My name is Bill Holland, and this is the BB 882i Sonic Maximizer. This was originally designed for live applications to correct envelope distortion.

What envelope distortion is what occurs when you experience a change in phase and amplitude in a signal to both the harmonic and fundamental frequencies. This will often happen if you go direct from your mixer into an amp and out the PA speakers. What the Maximizer does is it actually corrects that distortion and fixes the phase and amplitude issues.

Now, what's been an interesting development is the use of this in studio signal paths. A lot of major studios now have these and they're used to either as a mastering application or either to beef up an instrument. Now, most of the online demos I've seen and most of the written material I have seen on this has been revolving around guitars. In guitars it gives it a chunkier tone, kind of a bigger tone, and just kind of beefs everything up. Well, me being a synth and electronic guy, I thought to myself, "Well, how can I apply this to what I have or where would I use this?" Now, a lot of new synthesizer have a very big full sound with full polyphony, but a lot of the older analog stuff they still have that full sound but playing around with something like a maximizer can bring out both the low end and the high end. Now, on the box you'll see here we have a control called the low contour control. This control regulates the amount of phase correction being done to the bass. The process control regulates the amount of phase that is being corrected in the treble frequency, so if I turn them all the way down, you're going to get a dry signal, and if you turn them all the way up you can get a fully corrected signal. This is similar to what you'll experience in exciters as well. It's actually very similar to a harmonic exciter. So, what I've decided to do is grab my 707 that has been on loan to me this week, and run it through here and see what happens when we run an old-school drum machine through the Sonic Maximizer.

Now here you see I have my low contour set to the middle, my process set to the middle but I have no signal coming through. Why? It's set to out. This means the signal comes in, it goes out. Now, if I set it to in, you'll hear these turn on. You can see your levels coming here, and you can also see when it's clipping, so if I return this up you'll hear some digital clipping on my end but then it rolls it off, so if I set it back to out you'll hear the digital clipping right now. I will set it back and now it's fine.

Now, I'm going to slowly bring up the low contour and bump those lows. You can hear it kind of excite the lows as I go up and the same can be said of the highs. One thing to notice as I go all the way up, and you'll hear me roll of the bass, and you'll notice this is low, unlike the dry signal -- let's go back to that real quick -- so if bypass the signal, you'll hear the drums are really kind of muddy, but if I turn it back in here and bring my low contour and my process up, not only is -- I mean it's a little bit louder but you'll hear that the highs and basses are very distinct. You can hear the bass kick and the snare much clearer and the tambourine as well than you could when it was the dry signal.

Now again, you'll see what happens when I bring the low out, now I have very clear highs but it's kind of rolled off the low so this can also be used as a kind of way to correct or maximize your bass frequencies, depending on what you are going for.

Well, that's how to use the Sonic Maximizer with the drum machine. Keep in mind that if you use this with a keyboard, guitar, bass guitar -- actually, a lot of people get really good bass guitar results with this, and I wouldn't be surprised if Owen might try this out at some point with his bass guitar. Keep in mind as well, if you're a DJ, a mobile DJ and not somebody who goes to a club (in a club, you don't really bring your own gear) but if you're a mobile DJ or do parties at all, this is great because you can run your output from your mixer through here, and it will stop even if you just push it as hard as you want because obviously, DJs have this tendency to take their mixer up as far as they can go, you know three bars into the red. I've done it. Everybody at some point in their DJing career has done it. This prevents you from getting too harsh and from clipping too much end from overloading the sound, so that's not going to sound like crap. You can go pretty loud and you've got about, I think, 20 dB of headroom, so really, really useful for a variety of applications, the BBE Sonic Maximizer. This is the 882i model, and for now I'm Bill Holland on Gearwire.Com.