bapu
I'd pay $49 for the Novelty of it.

Agree, 49 or less.
The whole concept of separating the highs and lows to better understand your mix is not a bad idea, especially for beginners or late-session fatigued-ears.
As greenfly says, we can do it our-self with a matching EQ. The Soundways just makes it a little easier to access and provides some simple graphics.
 

Less

It wont be sold nowhere near $49 and they have already got some kind of partnership with Avid.  They will target the product towards 'professionals' lol.  As I said before, you can get the main critical listening effect through an EQ curve and all the rest of the bells and whistles are really just there to make the product do more than it actually does. 

I don't know that much about sonarworks, but for those of you who have it, I'm guessing that you will probably get the same critical listening effect by switching the NS10 type emulation on in the plugin.


 
 

I too was immediately turned off by the price tag. Interesting concept though. The owners / founders look real young! Good for them! I wish them well..!

Hi everyone. I've done some analysis and all this plugin does is put a simple filter over your audio. I've attached the curves as revealed by VST analyzer. The Low Leveler plugin is just an EQ. I have attached curves of the first setting ("organic"), but I couldn't be bothered to screenshot the other ones, but they are also just EQs of different shapes (setting 2 "flat" uses flat shelving filters at the extremes of the spectrum, and setting 3 "accurate" uses narrower peaking filters than setting one, and at slightly different points in the spectrum).
Using Q-Clone, each setting except "distortion listening" nulled. Each setting nulled to complete silence except "FM radio" and "vehicle," which nulled most of the way, but not quite. There is possibly some compression or mid/sides stuff happening on those settings. "Distortion listening messes" with the mid and sides so can't be replicated with a simple EQ, but it's easy enough to get something similar by boosting the highs of the side channels. Q-Clone produced the same curves as VST analyzer, so they are accurate.

I have saved each Q-Clone setting as a preset, and created a rack in Ableton that does exactly the same thing as the Reveal plugin, for about $30 (and let's be real, most people already have Q-Clone from whichever Waves bundle they own.)

I have posted this only because Soundways is taking the mickey with their pricing. I appreciate that research went into finding out which curve worked best for each role, and that having everything in a simple GUI is very convenient, but asking $250 for a simple filtering plugin beggars belief. Had they charged $20-$30 (like Toneboosters, for instance) I would have bought it and would never even have bothered to figure out what the plugin was actually doing, because the curves *are* very useful and it *is* a good idea to check your mix using something like this and the GUI *is* nice and pretty. But asking $250 for this is incredibly exploitative. Plugin companies have grown way too greedy and many show a complete lack of respect for their customer bass (think UA charging out the ass for the "voice of god" aka a simple resonant high pass filter *which doesn't even feature any added harmonic distortion*).

You all can decide if $250 is worth it to you, but Q-Clone is on sale for $29 right now...

Here are the curves. The forum is not letting me link to the album, but remove the spaces: h t t p : / / i m g u r . c o m / a / M X T u C

I cannot attach a link to this post, so until a moderator lets me you'll have to trust me or else do the tests I did :-)
 
Hi everyone. I've done some analysis and all this plugin does is put a simple filter over your audio. I've attached the curves as revealed by VST analyzer. The Low Leveler plugin is just an EQ. I have attached curves of the first setting ("organic"), but I couldn't be bothered to screenshot the other ones, but they are also just EQs of different shapes (setting 2 "flat" uses flat shelving filters at the extremes of the spectrum, and setting 3 "accurate" uses narrower peaking filters than setting one, and at slightly different points in the spectrum).

Using Q-Clone, each setting except "distortion listening" nulled. Each setting nulled to complete silence except "FM radio" and "vehicle," which nulled most of the way, but not quite. There is possibly some compression or mid/sides stuff happening on those settings. "Distortion listening" messes with the mid and sides so can't be replicated with a simple EQ, but it's easy enough to get something similar by boosting the highs of the side channels. Q-Clone produced the same curves as VST analyzer, so they are accurate.

I have saved each Q-Clone setting as a preset, and created a rack in Ableton that does exactly the same thing as the Reveal plugin, for about $30 (and let's be real, most people already have Q-Clone from whichever Waves bundle they own.)

I have posted this only because Soundways is taking the mickey with their pricing. I appreciate that research went into finding out which curve worked best for each role, and that having everything in a simple GUI is very convenient, but asking $250 for a simple filtering plugin beggars belief. Had they charged $20-$30 (like Toneboosters, for instance) I would have bought it and would never even have bothered to figure out what the plugin was actually doing, because the curves *are* very useful and it *is* a good idea to check your mix using something like this and the GUI *is* nice and pretty. But asking $250 for this is incredibly exploitative. Plugin companies have grown way too greedy and many show a complete lack of respect for their customer base (think UA charging out the ass for the "voice of god" aka a simple resonant high pass filter *which doesn't even feature any added harmonic distortion*).

You all can decide if $250 is worth it to you, but Q-Clone is on sale for $29 right now...

You need more posts, then you can add links.

There is an interview with Soundways in this month's Tape-Op magazine:
http://tapeop.com/interviews/btg/119/issues-lords-listening-soundways/
 
It's an interesting read, but doesn't exactly make me want to try their products.