Focusrite Liquid Mix HD: Theoretical Emulation At Its Finest
The Focusrite Liquid Mix HD plugin surely comes as good news for people with Pro Tools systems. We get a look at the plugin at AES, and it's filled to its point of surface tension with nifty features. You can construct your own EQs, and as our friendly rep tells us, Focusrite has made some modeling modifications to vintage processors that keep it simple by adding controls and features absent on the original unit.
For example, on their "Viking" setting (based on a Tube-Tech CL 1B Compressor), they've added attack and release controls not available on the original unit. That's because vikings had no control over their attack. It was just all attacking all the time.
FOCUSRITE REPRESENTATIVE: Welcome back once again to AES 2008, and welcome to Liquid Mix HD. I'm sincerely hoping that you know Liquid Mix you might know in the form of Liquid Mix or the newest Liquid Mix 16. Say the newest but actually no. Liquid Mix HD is brand new today at the show, and as the name suggests, it's Liquid Mix for Pro Tools HD. What it does is bring that Liquid Mix plugin, the exact same plugin, but seamlessly integrated within the Pro Tools HD environment.
So, in terms of differences from Liquid Mix and Liquid Mix HD, it's using the HD Accel cards. In terms of instances, you can get five instances on a single chip. For those who don't understand the chip breakdown, we're talking about over a hundred mono instances of 44.1 on a Pro Tools HD 3 standard system.
So, Liquid Mix, very briefly, just in case you don't know about it, provides you with in every single plugin a host of different emulations using dynamic convolution technology, so we go inside and we sample that original unit by throwing millions of pulses at all different frequencies and all different gains and mapping what happens to that pulse, and we've got 20 what, 40 different compressors. I'm selecting a classic Focusrite ISA 130 just like the one we talked about earlier, and there I have that compressor. What's interesting with some of the compressors of old, it's they often have restricted controls. So here, we've gone into an emulation we call Viking 1. I can't remember exactly which unit that's emulated off, bu you'll notice that the attack and release controls have gone blank, so this means usually that you got no control over attack and release, and that's because the original had no attack and release dial. But with Liquid Mix, because we have emulated the way that processor works, we can bring in attack and release so not only do you have 40 different classic compressors, you actually have whole other compressors that never existed before, so that's the Liquid Mix free mode. I wonder if anyone actually went into detail on that with the older products. It's quite a cool feature of Liquid Mix that takes it one step beyond just providing emulations.
The other thing you can do with Liquid Mix is build your own EQ. We've got 20 different classic EQs in here, and I can go through each band and then simply bring in on a band. I can take a low pass filter from a different EQ and slowly build up my own hybrid EQ and save that. So, the rough overview that's Liquid Mix and that plugin is now available within the Pro Tools HD environment. It's of course compatible with all the Pro Tools control surfaces. That's the main difference with the Pro Tools HD. Because it's working within Pro Tools HD, it takes advantage of the low latency environment. For the first time, you've got Liquid Mix HD or Liquid Mix running with about 12 samples of latency. That's like from here to there, basically nothing, and that means you can track for the first time with Liquid Mix, so you can place Liquid Mix HD over your vocal tracking within Pro Tools, something you couldn't do before with Liquid Mix or Liquid Mix 16.
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