McDSP to debut new plug-ins at NAMM next week

The 2008 NAMM Show kicks off next Thursday in Anaheim, California. It's one of the two main red banner days on the calendars of those in the music instrument business each year as new products are unveiled.

McDSP or more properly, the McDowell Signal Processing company, are the developers of some of my preferred high-end audio software plug-ins for the Digidesign Pro Tools HD environment (also available for native Pro Tools LE). For the record, I highly recommend their Synthesizer One virtual instrument for its rich sound and versatile feature set.

After a very long year and a half without any announcements of substantially new plug-ins (I'm excluding version upgrades, MacIntel support and bundles of existing products here), McDSP will be roaring back with demonstrations of three new effects at their NAMM booth.

The DE555 is a new generation of de-essing technology, providing
transparent, precise de-essing with unique flexibility. FutzBox is a
distortion and noise generator plug-in for creating low-fidelity versions of
audio signals. The NF575 noise filter is a high-resolution filter set
designed to remove a wide variety of noise types from audio.

Of these, the FutzBox looks to potentially hold the most interest for me personally. However, the current product plan will be to only offer these new plug-ins as part of their Emerald Pack (everything) bundle. The price of these new Emerald Pack bundles will only increase by a very reasonable $195 (upgrades for existing Emerald Pack owners will be the same price) but this brings the retail price to a staggering $2,795 for a Pro Tools HD system (and $1,495 for the Emerald Pack Native)!

I suppose this is their not very subtle way of velvet lining their heavy hand at prodding the existing customer base of individual product owners (like me) to upgrade uniformly to the Emerald Pack. As the owner of most of their individual products (I'm only four short of having all nine current products), my upgrade price to the existing Emerald Pack (before the new plug-ins) is still a considerable $995.

While I look forward to previewing these new plug-in products from McDSP (finally, after such a long wait), I can tell you right now that these Futzbox distortion effects will have to be pretty darned incredible for me to shell out something like $1,200 in order to get them!

Be sure to check back here next week for my personal coverage of the big NAMM show...


currently listening to Robert Wyatt - comicopera