NEBULA - Mantis

Overview

MANTIS PWM compressor is one of the first creations by SoundDrops. It models a device that was expressly designed and built with the creation of a N4 library in mind. Its sonic behavior has been especially optimized with a view to produce a program that could replicate all its desiderable musical features, yet without the inevitable drawbacks of the analog realm, such as unwanted distortion, noise, lack of repeatability, etc.

MANTIS is characterized by an extremely wide knee and a uniquely engaging musical action that can morph from almost invisible all the way to downright sonic abuse. It can act quite fast, since the minimum attack time is 0.1 mSec, still it always seems to mantain a certain musicality with its transparent and forgiving attitude… Unless it is set to “Nuke”, that is. The rightmost position of the Ratio control can produce a negative compression action that in a way reminds the well known All-Buttons-In setting of the 1176-type devices.

MANTIS includes two programs: the regular one, precisely MANTIS, and an external side-chain enabled one, MANTIS_SC. In this case, the sidechain signal must be sent to inputs n. 3 & 4, as is the norm with SC compressors, Acqua plug-ins included.

MANTIS started as an experiment just out of technical curiosity, but eventually, the way this circuit worked and sounded made it worth of being sampled and offered in a convenient N4 library format.
MANTIS will surely find its place of honor in many mixing and mastering chains.

Details

MetaWare – Augmented Reality Acqua Libraries

MetaWare = “Beyond the Hard/Software”. A series of Acqua/Nebula libraries for N4 by SoundDrops based on an innovative concept. Proprietary hardware processors are specifically conceived, designed and built from the ground up with the creation of N4 libraries in mind.

Great care then is taken during the sampling and deconvolving process. Thanks to Acustica’s innovative technology, each aspect of the device’s behavior (frequency and phase response, harmonic and dynamic action and so on) can be separately sampled and then reassembled in an optimized form. The final outcome is a series of extremely clean and noiseless vectors, as it is easily apparent from the resulting response plots.

This procedure allows the creation of virtual machines that would be plainly impossible (or, at least, extremely unpractical) to build in the real world; a series of consistent and dependable digital processors that yet retain all the great sonic traits of real world analog hardware, down to the tiniest detail.

© SoundDrops 2019

Mandatory requirements

In order to use products from the official 3rd party developers:

- It is mandatory first to install either N4 Player or N4. Only after this it will be possible to proceed with the installation of 3rd party products.
- Please don't install both versions of N4 - use only one of them to guarantee a proper functioning of the products!
- Please make sure that you use an up-to-date version of N4 or N4 Player (at the point of this release N4 is version 1.1.011).
- N4 FREE and N4 Player cannot coexist.

Use our new application Aquarius -  1.2.607 version(see the User Guide in Aquarius page) to complete the procedure of installation and authorization;  3rd party developers products are only available on Aquarius.

Contact info

 Mail me at [email protected]