SteDal wrote:At this point I'd like to give some additional info about Ochre and the hardware behind it.
In the early 80s I was still a music student with a strong passion for audio electronics. The acoustical response of the music room in my house wasn't that great, so (rather naively) I thought about building a parametric eq to correct it.
Of course we had no Internet back then (yet, believe it or not, life could be great even without Google...
), and it wasn't easy for a non-professional like me to find schematics, let alone those of high quality commercial devices.
For testing purposes I built samples of two different eq designs I found floating around somewhere (I seem to remember that one of them had been published by the glorious Elektor Electronics magazine).
Then, one day a friend of mine handed me a copy of a different, somewhat simpler and more elegant schematic. I was intrigued, so I tested it and had a clear impression of a better, more transparent sound; I decided to design and build a stereo eq with 3 + 3 of such bands. So far, so good.
Fast forward to 2005. One day I happened to have a look at the schematic of model 2800, a parametric eq designed by S*A*E in the late 70's... It rang a bell. A quick search in my DIY archive revealed that the eq I built more than 20 years before (and still working, mind you!) was closely inspired by that device from the 70's, which, in turn, showed more than a resemblance with the almost mythical S**t*c 432. Well, there was a good reason back then for me to like the way it sounded, after all!
Of course, the 432 is a whole different beast; it's built like a tank, the quality of the hardware is stellar, etc., but the comparatively lowly 2800 had the same bridged-T topology at its heart, albeit with a different bootstrapping circuit and a serial configuration (the three parametric bands in the 432 are connected in parallel, instead).
In a nutshell, this is the story of this eq.
The way I see it, Ochre is a kind of a pilot episode by Acustica Audio (a free one, at that!) paving the way for things to come. Giancarlo had this vision of software replicating unique pieces of hardware; possibly, in some cases, one could even build something expressly for that scope. I'm glad to open the dances, then.
Actually, as soon as G told me he was interested in sampling this eq, I thought I'd better recap it, swap the old bread-and-butter op-amps for last generation ones and provide it with a discrete output buffer complete with Sowter transformer - as it's always the case with Acqua plugins, the user can switch the "colour" preamp stage on or off at will. Now my eq is at its best ever.
And so here it is, Ochre... an everyday workhorse eq with 3 parametric bands and all the analog flavour that only Acqua technology is capable of. And what is more, it's free!
Enjoy it.
