It lists for $329, but they're offering it for $279, plus using the coupon code "newx3x50off" for 50% discount, my total price was $139.50! I've had my eye on this for a long time but it was too expensive and had an iLok. Now that both of those obstacles are gone I bought it. I played around with it for a couple hours and am truly amazed and loving it! Check out the videos. I'm pretty sure the coupon code works for everything at PA, btw.

Oops forgot the link to Plugin Alliance: https://www.plugin-allian...pectrum_mapper_v2.html

Could I ask, exactly why is this so different from other mastering compressors / plug ins? Still seems a great deal of money even with all the discounts.
Would love to hear your thoughts 
Nigel

This plugin is unique and difficult to describe but I'll try. Realize I've only had it for a day. I think of it as a a multi-band compressor with a massive number of bands. The bands are not set manually like your usual multi-band comp. The bands are set automatically to match the frequencies of a source sample that you capture (or use one of the preset curves). There are many uses for it other than as a master compressor. Another use that I've seen highly praised in other forums is as a deesser. You capture a clean section of the vocal track and DSM matches the entire track, reducing/removing esses and pops. That also evens out the vocals on the track. Another use, I've got a lot of old tapes from the 70's/80's of live recordings which were recorded poorly. Most everything I tried to improve the sound makes them sound worse (eq, compression, melda autoeq, harbal, ozone). I popped this on one and went through some of the presets and was amazed at the improvement.

Thanks so much - I think I am starting to just about understand what this is! It does sound intriguing - a lot of money still but perhaps I can see why.
Oh well, start to prepare the justification defence as to why this is essential to my plan for world domination of the current music scene and why I JUST HAVE TO HAVE IT!!!!
Thanks again
Nigel

Hi I just watched all the videos - they do make it look good I have to say.
One thing that occurred to me was that in some ways this reminded me of the Harbal plug in. I actually purchased this some years ago but never got satisfactory results - OK to analyze a track but the corrective EQ was not good in my opinion. I never upgraded this so only have a very old version.
Have you ever tried Harbal? Are there similarities and how's your experimentation getting along?
Cheers
Nigel

Hi Nigel. I owned Harbal but haven't used it in several years. If I recall correctly, it matches a captured sample by creating a fixed eq curve. DSM matches a captured sample by applying compression to many individual frequency bands in real time. DSM doesn't modify a particular frequency unless that frequency gets louder than that frequency in the captured sample. DSM can be very transparent, but Harbal applies eq to the whole track and is anything but transparent. I've been playing with DSM some more and getting to know some of the controls. It sounds very natural and smooth to me. I'm sure some other people won't like it though so, if you're interested, I suggest downloading the demo to see how it sounds. The 50% coupon code is good until tomorrow, Oct 31.

From what I saw on youtube, it seems like a mix rescue limiter for the master bus? It seems (again 1st blush) like if it's recorded properly, bused properly, EQed, compressed and limited/gated/expanded/excited, De-essed, delayed, verbed, widened, and panned properly all along they way? Well, I'm not the mix guru, but there's a lot of guys I look up to here who do what I just described and get "AMAZING" results...

Hey Johnny One Note, ol pal...could you post links to some of those "amazing mixes"??

Well I downloaded this and to be frank I could hardly believe some of the results I got in a the first few minutes of trying it. I tried this on a track which I had mastered with my normal preferred set up of Ozone and Xeon - simply stunning - a few clicks (I just tried one of the included pre captured response curves) and the result was easily as good if not better than what I had achieved after some time with Ozone etc. As some would say here, real Snake Oil!!!
Now I do not pretend to be the best mix / mastering person on the planet - we normally have our finished stuff done externally, so perhaps someone far more skilled than me could get great results using the normal compressor / eq etc set up.
But for people like me, this could be really useful - so there went the money for my new synth!!!!!
Nigel