Jose Hidalgo
Addicted to Fun and Learning
Hi everybody, I hope this is the correct place for this topic. If not, sorry!
This may surprise some of you, as it goes against the "fidelity" part of "hi-fi". And yet I find it an interesting topic.
Let's assume we have already a good hi-fi system. Everything works fine, sound is very good, etc.
Source has to be a PC BTW.
What if from time to time we wanted to feel the "warmth" of a good old tube amp? What if we wanted to hear those nice even harmonics that we all like? What if we wanted an "analogue" feel? What if we just wanted to change the sound, ever so slightly, for some particular songs?
Rather than investing in a whole new hi-fi amp/preamp, we can use the source PC to accurately simulate such devices.
There are virtual preamp simulators that we can use to tweak the sound to our liking. Most are in VST form I guess, some may even be standalone apps.
The idea is to insert such virtual preamp in the audio chain, between the player and the output. So we'd have :
Audio player --> Virtual preamp --> Output (DAC, etc.)
The purpose of this topic would be to share our experiences with such virtual preamps (free and commercial), and to list the best of them for a hi-f... damn it, for pleasing our ears, lol. BTW, this is about altering the sound signature (in a tasteful way), so it's not about EQs, that's another topic.
I'll start with three freebies, in alphabetical order :
This may surprise some of you, as it goes against the "fidelity" part of "hi-fi". And yet I find it an interesting topic.
Let's assume we have already a good hi-fi system. Everything works fine, sound is very good, etc.
Source has to be a PC BTW.
What if from time to time we wanted to feel the "warmth" of a good old tube amp? What if we wanted to hear those nice even harmonics that we all like? What if we wanted an "analogue" feel? What if we just wanted to change the sound, ever so slightly, for some particular songs?
Rather than investing in a whole new hi-fi amp/preamp, we can use the source PC to accurately simulate such devices.
There are virtual preamp simulators that we can use to tweak the sound to our liking. Most are in VST form I guess, some may even be standalone apps.
The idea is to insert such virtual preamp in the audio chain, between the player and the output. So we'd have :
Audio player --> Virtual preamp --> Output (DAC, etc.)
The purpose of this topic would be to share our experiences with such virtual preamps (free and commercial), and to list the best of them for a hi-f... damn it, for pleasing our ears, lol. BTW, this is about altering the sound signature (in a tasteful way), so it's not about EQs, that's another topic.
I'll start with three freebies, in alphabetical order :
- Shattered Glass Audio SGA1566 : http://www.shatteredglassaudio.com/product/104
- Softube Saturation Knob : https://www.softube.com/saturationknob
- Voxengo Tube Amp : https://www.voxengo.com/product/tubeamp