FOCUSRITE REPRESENTATIVE: Welcome back at the Focusrite booth this morning at AES 2008. This is the Forte Suite. This is now being taken over in terms of distribution by Focusrite, and what that means is a very significant price roll. Forte Suite is available in the U.S. now for just $399.99 instead of $595.95 I think so. That’s almost $200 cheaper.

So the Forte Suite. What is it? Well, this brings me on to the history of Focusrite. Focusrite used to make consoles. Between 1985 and 1990 or so, there were 12 huge Focusrite consoles built, and those consoles were considered sonically the most exciting consoles the world has ever seen. They ranged to really large consoles, one of which actually cost over a million dollars to build, and that’back in 1990, 1989 I think. So, a very exciting console sonically, but nowadays in the modern age, in the DAW age, it’s all about plugins. It’s all about sound within a DAW. The Forte Suite provides that same sound in terms of EQ and compression and dynamics as the original Forte console. So, zooming in on the back, you can see the software here, and what you have is a complete channel strip module that provides compression, dynamics, EQ, but you can also break this module down so that it doesn’t load your CPU too much, so you can run loads and loads of instances of Forte Suite within your HD system, so you have your EQ, your compressor, your dynamics. There’s individual modules or a whole channel strip and you can change the route of the channel strip. It also provides frequency adaptive compression and inserts as well. You also have a surround sound compressor. So, a really wonderful sounding Focusrite plugin for Pro Tools HD or LE that’s the Forte Suite.