Could Alkane Be THE BEST Saturation Plugin Ever?

I heard good things about the Alkane. Thanks for an excellent demo!

299 dont make me laugh

I just tried it and used it on different material to test it out.
I'd give this an overall 7.8 out of 10.
The sound is incredible but there is lots of room for improvements and added capabilities.
Here's my list of good factors of this plugin and where it can improve.

The positives:
• Overall distortion quality and sound is among the best distortion in the plugin market. Very high quality!
• Incredible automatic gain compensation when dialing in the saturation at significant amounts, AND while switching through the different modes. HUGE plus!
• The processing maintains a clean low-end signal and punch. Most distortion plugins remove a lot of low-end, but this plugin seems to maintain an amazing low-end. Probably the best preservation of low-end I've ever heard. HUGE plus!
• Beautiful resizable GUI. (Although, personally I'm not a fan of the tube mode display, but that's just a personal preference maybe.)
• Very minimal phasing when blending the dry and wet signal. The filter section also maintains a very good phase relationship, and usually phasing happens when filtering out the lows and dialing back the mix amount in most distortion plugins; not on this one.
• Customizable visualization options.
• A very low-latency! Only 0.062ms. Wow!
• Free trial available.

Improvements:
• The price is incredibly steep. A whopping $300! I would value this around $150 at it's highest.
• No global bypass. There's only a bypass for each section of the plugin: color and EQ. This DEFINITELY needs a way to turn everything off for comparison purposes.
• There's a big drop in volume when you place the plugin on a DAW channel. Although this is probably to set headroom for when distortion is applied, I find this tedious because even at a low amount the plugin is still applying distortion and you would need to gain compensate manually if you want an accurate way of comparing. I would expect the plugin to maintain the same volume consistency for a very smooth workflow to avoid any loss of perception or details during configuration... especially for the price it's valued at!
• I wish there was a way to control the tone of each of the different modes. The 4 modes are the only available tones. I kept wanting to mangle with the different modes to get a lower or darker tone but that's only possible by either doing less distortion or a preferred amount and dialing down the lowpass filter. I wish there was more options in this regard.
• This NEEDS a sidechain filter. While distorting bass heavy audio content like full drum loops or bass guitars there's no control of what frequency content the distortion responds to. Say, for example, there's a big boomy kick drum or a bassy kick tail or reverb within a drum loop, this plugin would continuously distort the whole signal instead of responding to just the transients of the drums, therefore resulting in a more practical and musical response. Again, this is NEEDED!
• There's no oversampling, and maybe the algorithm or processing has bypassed the need for this function and it already runs at the highest quality available... I'm not sure.
• The 3D visualizer, although it looks amazing, doesn't serve much practical use... It's mainly a visual appeal because it doesn't display resonances or any way of viewing the difference of pre or post processing. The EQ section has no spectral analyzer, so you have to go fishing for the area where you want to cut instead of seeing the frequencies in relation to where you're cutting.
• This plugin would greatly benefit from a dynamics processing option, much like the fabfilter plugins, where the amount of processing would react to the input dynamic range, therefore resulting in a dynamic distortion. This plugin is completely static.
• No linear phase mode, especially useful when working in parallel signals, although this is not a deal breaker for me.
• No A/B comparison; a simple way to compare between two different configurations to gauge your decisions and compare.
• The plugin has a weird reloading glitch when you re-open it again after it's been closed or minimized during a session. All the controls get squished into the top-left corner for a moment until it redistributes all the GUI to it's default form.

i guess i don't have to worry about paying the $300 hammer because it's only on mac for right now 🙃

IMHO the best plugin of 2024 , sounds like anything else in its own category

I used to put the same amount in PM P42 mod some time ago.. And I regret it. I definitely fell to the hype.
But here, no, this plugin sounds really really good, and can compete with very expensive hardware units without a doubt. It does not only add harmonics, but some life to the elements, scene, impact, the low are massive, highs are pristine, all being very musical.
Expensive? Yes, in nowadays market where everything will eventually be discounted to -70% at some point (hey plugin alliance softube, and the never ending discount masters, waves!!!).
But considering this is their first plugin, which is an absolute masterpiece, worth every cent IMHO. I'll definitely keep an eye on these guys

What desk is that? Great channel btw

This does indeed sound fantastic. Is the oversampling always on or is there a control somewhere? I couldn't find any...

$300 US Dollars OMG! Couldn't you do this with any good sat plugin on a parallel bus with eq before or after and mix it in to taste? I mean it sounds good but I don't think any plugin is worth that. Ozone 11 is worth a bit to me but even that I think should be $100. It's just a software license after all. Do you think it's reasonable?

You should lead with the price. Be a short video then and we can get on with our day

I think I have enough Saturation Plug--Ins ( FABFILTER "Saturn 2", SOUND TOYS -"Decapitator", UAD "Studer A800" TAPE, UAD "Oxide", then som e Free rondom ones even in CHANNEL STRIP w/ WAVES...,) Pus My Rupert Neve, Shelford Channel "SILK RED & BLUE" Thx for showing us this! just can't do this one. I'm sure there's others that I can't think of at the moment. George Amodei :)

$299 for a pretty simple saturator! Some plugin companies have become absolutely shameless.

This plugin has oversampling?

Thanks for the demo. How do you think it compares to Fab Saturn?

Sounds great but that price...maybe more in the $150 range but it's a nice plugin. I have my saturators that do the job (love my Black Box HG-2) but it's whatever works for you. Maybe down the road I'll consider this one.

bruh spanking that track

300. Dam yo. I can grab a 500 series compressor for that. But it def sounds good

Sounds great. The price is prohibitive for me though. $254 with the discount link is still a kick in the gut for a saturation plugin.
Loved it on the drums. It definitely added some magic there. On the bass and vocals It was good - but not mind-blowing.
Quick question: What's a "chube"? 😆😆 Just kidding, man. Great video as always, Rhys.

Some GS people said this is just an expensive waveshaper.

im first!🖐