Stock Plugins Vs. Third Party Plugins

M

mkamsi

Guest
Hi all,
My question is,
The job of every EQ is only cutting or boosting specific frequencies and the job of every compressor is to even out the dynamic range. If this is the case, this can be done with the stock plugins(Like EQ Eight and Compressor included in Ableton Live). Then Why we need third party plugins(like EQ, compressor, reverb, delay, saturation etc.)?
 
the difference is in sonic quality, and emulation of classic hardware that you cannot buy for love or money or your first born

the sonic quality differences come in the form of the precision of the floating point math used to generate the transformation
- most stock plug-ins round the math too soon in the process thus causing unwanted distortion and jitter that needs to be corrected with dither inside the plug-in or immediately after it
- third party plug-ins generally leave rounding until the last possible moment in the process - i.e. conversion takes place just before the audio leaves the plug-in ensuring that the audio is "cleaner"
 
I'd worry about stuff like that only if a daw lacks it.
A vst's merit is just that it's usable anywhere while built in stuff is usable anywhere via rewire.
Meh...zebralette covers what reason doesn't do, wavetable makin.
mrythmizer and grossbeats are other examples. not sure if fabfilter even matters tbh but hey people say that's good too.
 
What bandcoach said, and also what KonKossKang said.

Difference in sound quality is a major issue we should all be concerned about, that's not to say the stock plugins can't make for a killer track though. And third party vsts to me make more sense because I don't have to rely on a specific daw to carry out my tasks if I happen to switch later down the line.

Not to mention that many professional third party plugin developers spend years perfecting these and focus solely on that rather than trying to be good at everything, and the absolutely huge variety of different ones you could never cram into the stock arsenal of a DAW.
 
Last edited:
I honestly think the stock plugins are just fine for about 90% of the time. If you sit a pro engineer in front of a DAW with nothing but those, I'm pretty sure the end result will still be professional sounding. No doubt there are many a great plugin to be had on the 3rd party market, but not having them shoudn't be an excuse for shitty mixes.
 
Back
Top