Nomad Factory recently released Retrology Motown, a bundle of 2 equalizer plug-ins designed to improve the quality of digital sound recordings.
The plug-ins aim to recreate the warm sound qualities of legendary analog hardware passive equalizers used by Motown engineers.
Retrology Motown includes Retro Music-Tone and Retro Film-Tone, two 7-band passive equalizer plug-ins. Except for the frequency bands, both equalizers are identical.
Music-Tone and Film-Tone both feature proportional Q’s which have:
- a broad Q with small boost/cuts
- a narrow Q with greater boost/cuts
In other words: small adjustments to the bands will result in more subtle changes over a wider bandwidth, while driving the numbers closer to min/max values affects fewer frequencies.
Installation of the plug-ins was pretty straightforward. Nomad Factory uses PACE Interlok protection, which seems to be problematic for quite some people. Although it’s my personal belief that this type of copy protection does not stop piracy, a company is entitled to try to protect their products. (If you dislike PACE enough to not buy their products, please just let Nomad Factory know they’ve lost a potential sale).
Anyway, I had absolutely no problems installing PACE and registering the plug-ins with the Challenge/Response authorization (iLok authorization is also available).
With everything in place I did a little comparison with a few other EQ’s. The samples below are identical except for the EQ used (files were normalized after recording).
Clean beat | Fruity Parametric EQ | KarmaFX EQ | Retrology Film-Tone
Note: since the Film-Tone has a Proportional Q there’s no way I could A/B them with 100% accuracy.
So what do I think?
The Retrology equalizers have a straightforward user interface which is easy to use. They are also very light on the CPU.
Whether or not you can call its sound analog or vintage I’ll leave up to you, but I quite liked the results I got with these EQ’s.
Nomad Factory offers a fully functional 10 day trial version, so I advice you try them on your own material to see how you like them.
More information: Nomad Factory
Hey there, I'm Ronnie and I run Rekkerd.org. I'm a bedroom music producer and guitar player, and I love chicken vindaloo & all things glitch.
