OT: Waves Renaissance MAXX Native

[Frederick]

I like the price and the possibilities. Anyone here have Waves Native (I'm thinking of running it on a Mac G5 Dual), and if so, is this little bundle recommended and considered a good deal?

I'm wanting to use it for as an addendum to my current plugs (Altiverb & standard Logic Plug-ins.) Suggestions welcome.

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Waves Renaissance MAXX Native
Renaissance Maxx Bundle with 7 Audio Processing Plug-Ins - Native

Manufacturer: Waves
Retail Price: $600.00 SALE PRICE: $450.97

Included in this bundle:
Renaissance Channel
Renaissance EQ
Renaissance Bass
Renaissance Reverberator
Renaissance Compressor
Renaissance Vox
Renaissance DeEsser

[Joseph Burrell]

Have never used the Native, but I've messed around with the Direct X edition of the Renessaince products. I thought the were very nice all-around plug-ins. Wish I could afford to have them at home.

[Bruce A. Richardson]

You can't go wrong with Waves. They're the best overall quality plugins out there, across the board.

I'd call this bundle a good general production set. The R-Channel is great, a very comprehensive "gold channel" for tracks.

[His Frogness]

You really can't go wrong with Waves. I've found their plugs to be the most stable and clean sounding you can get.

It concerns me that this bundle is so small. It's pretty entry-level. I would suggest taking another look and making sure there isn't a more comprehensive bundle you might be able to squeeze into. If not, that's fine, you have to start somewhere.

[Joris de Man]

I second that..ehm..'third' that:)

Waves are some of the most used (and best) plugins around..can't go wrong with them.

The renchannel, eq and compressor are fantastic and in general the UI of waves are topnotch; very userfriendly and tweakable.

The reverb is good to although can be a bit of a cpu hog. It won't touch your Altiverb though but it is a good 'native' reverb.

It is an excellent bundle and my guess is that once you get it you won't be able to live without it!

Cheers,

Joe

[His Frogness]

Well I just looked this up at Waves' site and found their upgrade path (http://www.waves.com/default.asp?url=content.asp?id=197)
You're right, Gold doesn't seem to come with Channel. That sucks. I only mentioned looking at other bundles because of the vast array of plug-ins that Waves offers.

My first thought was that if you had all of Waves' plug-ins, you wouldn't end up using the ones that come in Maxx very much, but now that I've taken a closer look, I think it's fine. Take the EQ for example. I had thought that Q10 was just a better plug-in that Ren EQ, but it appears as if they have different functions. Ren EQ is tailored for an analog eq sound while Q10 is more precise.

I was also thinking that Gold would have everything in Maxx, pluse more, which doesn't seem to be the case either. So, nevermind. Get Maxx :)

[Bruce A. Richardson]

I have every plugin that Waves makes, and actually I use those on this list a BUNCH. Which is to say how good they are.

The L3, by the way, is killer.

[Luke Skirenko]

For the PC there are so many alternatives to the Waves stuff for a fraction of the cost. It seems odd that more developers aren't porting their plugins to the mac.

[Frederick]

Thanks for the advice! Now its budgeting time to see what can be seen ;)

[Bruce A. Richardson]

For the PC there are so many alternatives to the Waves stuff for a fraction of the cost. It seems odd that more developers aren't porting their plugins to the mac.
There are. But it's surprising how few of them are good alternatives for a fraction of the cost. Most of the really viable alternatives to Waves are comparable in price, sometimes even more expensive when you break apart the bundles and go plugin for plugin.

Waves' pricing can seem high at first glance, but what they're really selling is a minimum investment, so to speak. Once you've bought in, there are a lot of perks to keep you happy. For the upper-tier bundles, in particular, purchasers are always getting free upgrades and additional plugins at no charge--sometimes for a year or two after purchase.

I have to confess--I was really adamantly negative about Waves before I finally bit the bullet. I just didn't care for their "attitude." But I got into a situation where I needed the technology, and needed to have parity with some partners of mine at the time on a project level. And the more I used Waves, the less I had any desire to use anything else. These guys own SO much intellectual property by giants in psychoacoustics like Blumlien and Gerzon--some of it just now being leveraged--that their work tends to be spot-on "musical." In contrast, there are many offerings by other companies which seem to be equals on paper, but when you actually get them into a production situation, they're much harder to use musically. They can make a lot of umusical sounds, and it's more time consuming to get that "equal" result. It's pretty hard to force a Waves plugin to make grossly unmusical sounds. This is really apparent with their compressors, vs. a lot of other compressors on the market. The difference, ultimately, lies in the design of adjustment ranges, and in an approach that puts the greatest range of adjustability right in the sweet spot. This seems to be a common experience with most people I know who use Waves...with few exceptions, once a person has started working with Waves, they tend to use them almost exclusively.

Don't get me wrong--there are a lot of great minds out there designing very wonderful DSP products. But the ones which actually "compete" musically with Waves tend to fall into one of two categories. Either they are super-boutique plugins (Sony Oxford line comes to mind) or they're niche products (special distortion emulations, super-specific effects, etc.). For the bread and butter, everyday needs, it is tough to find products which match the price/quality of Waves, plugin for plugin.

To me, that means there's room in the market for someone who's lean and smart, but it is a TOUGH market in which to make a profit.

I think the Mac thing is just numbers. Although a disproportionate number of musicians use Macs as opposed to the overall computing population (as with graphic and visual artists) it's still not a risk a lot of folks are going to take. They've still got to compete with Waves, and with other highly established vendors who have always developed for Mac.