I have used both the plugin and the hardware. Both for a collective duration of about 1 second. It seemed to be the same, but I never did a direct side-by-side comparison.

jamiey,
i appreciate your feedback.

fyi,
i installed the vst and i'm impressed with what it does. it seems a little bit tinny when you jack up the high harmonics, but the low harmonics seem to respond really well. overall, it did give quite a bit of life to the tracks i ran it thru, but i'm pretty used to the digital side of life right now, so i still don't knowe the REAL sound i'm s'posed to get from it. i'm a little set back that the vst never came with a manual. i had to hit up bbe's website to get a pdf manual of the 882i, and it suited me well.

anybody else????

I have/had both and dislike them pretty equally. :shock:

I actually like the plug in for what it does.... I tend to use it to mix guitars that might be a bit dull or lifeless....Also sometimes on vocals to get a clearer sound...
...Never used the bottom control over 3 and the top over 4 though.... It sounds quite shit over those settings...

A bit of a one trick pony really and with better recordings (better mics etc.) would be useless...but since i mix a lot of stuff for my friends that they record in really cheap small studios and then bring to me, i use it a lot

Whoops! I forgot to put up the photo of my "custom" BBE Maximizer plugin.

I used a program (Resource Hacker) to replace the original image information with my own...

(Dead Link Removed)

Fully functional. Never used, but it makes a great conversation piece when a session is getting crazy...

jeez, MM!!
you must REALLY dislike these products.
although i think (judging by the design), you were running the older dxi version.
just out of curiousity, which hardware version of the sonic maximizer did you have??

I hated these things, too, until I used them for broadcast(Not the Maximizer, specifically, the other one..?)......

Years ago, when they first came out, they really did make a spot sound louder... I believe it is done by adding distortion at particularly obnoxious frequencies, but... again... if it seems to help..? Of course, sooner or later everybody used them and any advantage was gone... Then, the spots with nothing on them sounded most "noticable"... Hard to win...

Speaking of winning..? Now that everyone uses tons of this distortion creating stuff, I have wondered if - at least in part - this..?...this "driving intensity" is a major cause of greatly lessened radio listening?(Or maybe it's just the horrible programming?)

I don't listen to radio anymore, but TV, which uses the same stuff, I find myself turning off after I notice that I'm all tensed-up and nervous(And this from the Weather Channel!)((Maybe it's just the tornadoes in the forecast?))...

Anyway, when I can I like a sound with nothing added. No compression, maximizing anything, etc. Good sound can be(And was for a l-o-n-g time) done just this way.)

TG

Where can I pick up one of those Stupidifiers? I have some extra space in my rack! Also, do they have a version that goes to eleven?

i just dl'd RESOURCE HACKER, and this is a fun app.
thanx for pointing it out MM!!

is there a difference between distortion and harmonic distortion??

i think that BBE Sonic Maximizer plugin is great. whenever im recording a live sample of a song for pre-production means, i toss that VST on, it harmonicaly inhances the volume without me having to compress the shit of it or using some lame "loudness" plugin...also, just while i was screwing around on one of my client's piano recordings i tossed BBE Maximizer on and it actually added lots of character to the mix aswell as a nice attack on the keys, it was a bit of an accident, but it sounded really nice.