Frindle DSM 50% off

Hey folks,
 
If you've followed the plugin news over the years, you might have heard about Paul Frindle's Dynamic Spectrum Mapper.  It was first released several years ago, and has garnered much praise since then for its unique function.  The high price (>$300) and 32-bit only status hasn't seemed to deter serious fans.  Well, the plugin has just been released in 64-bit form, and is being sold by Plugin Alliance this month for $139.50 when you use the voucher code newx3x50off.  That's half off the listed "intro" price.
 
This is a unique plugin.  Mr. Frindle is a legend in music production circles, having been involved with SSL and Sonnox, from what I read (he also has posted many times in various forums -- seems like a very cool guy.)  DSM is sort of a multi-band compressor that uses a curve as a target for the thresholds -- I'm probably not describing it properly, but that's my impression.  You can capture a dynamic curve of a signal (track, bus, mix, etc.) and use that as the target, or use one of the many presets.  The usual compressor controls are there, along with others that reward experimentation. 
 
Googling reveals a lot of enthusiastic users of DSM -- it gets used on everything from single instrument tracks to full mixes.  I just started demoing it, and while I can't say it's a must-have yet, it did impress me with its de-essing ability.  Most "de-essers" I've tried either aren't effective, or they dull the signal too much, or they "pump" when they hit sibilance.  That includes highly touted ones like the new FabFilter.  DSM doesn't do that -- on a vocal track, it did add some weight to the sound (which I think could be fixed with more fiddling), but the esses were transparently reduced without pumping.  It also seems to reduce plosives and odd transients. 
 
There's a lot of potential applications here.  I haven't yet got it to improve one of my full mixes (Ozone is hard to beat in that department), but it does something interesting to a drum bus -- gives it some punch that I haven't yet decided that I like.  So, for me the jury's still out on this -- but I can say that if you're tempted by the FF DS or some other high-end de-essing solution, you may want to demo this first.  Being less expensive than others right now is a plus.
 
(Hey, you know what else is a good de-esser?  The new NI Vari-Comp or their VC2A compressor.  Ozone, too.  With these, I find no need for  a "real" de-esser, plus they make vocals sound so nice.  As always, YMMV.)
 
Cheers,
Eddie

bitflipper


I would love to have DSM. It would have simplified many remedial tasks where microphone and room issues had compromised a track with intermittent resonances. When the product was first announced I was elated - finally, somebody had built the plugin I'd been searching for all these years. Then I saw the price.

 
Do you think an ordinary multi-band comp would have done the trick for those kinds of issues?  I guess you'd have to determine the problem frequency and created a band around that with a high limiting ratio (which is basically what de-essers do), so I guess DSM would save a bit of time, but I'm still not sure whether it has significant advantages over tools that I already have. 
 
If anyone out there has any tips or experiences with DSM they can share, please feel free to chime in.
 
Cheers,
Eddie