Wednesday, February 11, 2015

Outboard gear or software plug-ins?


You want to weigh out the pros and cons. If I got to choose one, and only one between the two, it 
would be outboard gear. My opinion is a subjective one and Ill tell you why.  Outboard gear is appealing to the eye then plug-ins. Outboard gear doesn't use processing power from your computer. They also have their own internal processing to prevent the computer from overloading. You're less likely to run into any glitches, or technical problems during a live show or recording session. The cons that I see in outboard gear is the bulkiness of all the equipment. In a studio environment the equipment can usually stay in the same place depending on how you have everything patched, but, in a live sound environment, you're moving equipment from show to show. Outboard gear is always more expensive then the plug-ins, because it cost more for the company's to build the physical devices rather then creating them virtually. Plug-ins can be great. You don't have to worry about carrying them anywhere. Download them on to your drive and use them as virtual gear on to your DAW (digital audio workstation). They don't cost as much as the actual hardware device and they take up no physical space. You can use them in live sound or even in the studio. The cons I see with this, is the amount of processing power it uses up. So if your going to stock up on plug-ins you better have a computer with lots of processing power. Another problem that you can have with plug-ins are the possibilities of running into glitches. Its running off digital software instead of pure analog signal processing. Use these pro and cons figure out what you need according to your profession.




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