v2.1 Audio Ease Speakerphone

Authentic speakers and their environments

Audio Ease Speakerphone is a speaker simulation plug-in with over 500 customizable presets.

A bad GSM connection on a busy sidewalk, a bullhorn with feedback and a helicopter overhead, or a 1952 rockabilly guitar amp in a recording studio live room: The Speakerphone audio plug-in gives you authentic speakers of any size together with their natural environments.

All the walkie-talkies, distant transistor radios, upstairs TV sets, bullhorns, cell phones and guitar cabinets you will ever need. Speakerphone (Mac , Windows, iLok or challenge response) will add dial tones, operator, static, and you can select from a wealth of ambiences on either the caller or receiver’s end.

Speakerphone, powered by Altiverb, combines a wealth of effects including a convolution engine that uses actual samples of hundreds of original speakers, a radio receiver tuning dial, record player scratch and static generator, GSM cell phone data compression, distortion, tremolo, delay, a variety of EQ and dynamics, bit crushing, sample rate reduction, a full blown convolution reverb, and a library of samples to combine into entire environments.

400 speaker impulse responses, 23 microphones, 106 ‘Covers’ (from blankets to car trunks), 53 Altiverb rooms and outdoor spaces, 5 gigabyte of ambiences and sound FX, and 12 DSP modules from Leslie to GSM compression, conveniently presented to you in well over 500 presets.

Features

• Presets – Select one of the many hundreds of presets from the preset browser that appears when you click in the preset bar.
• Snapshots – A preset can also be stored in one of 10 numbered slots below the preset bar. Do this by clicking ‘store’, followed by a click on the desired slot. Recall a preset by clicking on the slot. ‘automation preset index’ is an automatable parameter. You can therefore invoke switches using your workstation’s parameter automation. In Pro Tools this also works in case ‘automation preset index’ is the only parameter that is automation enabled. The contents of all automation preset slots are in turn saved in a single (Pro Tools) Preset, as well as in the Session file.
• autolevel – This is an automatic leveler to ensure that the input is just loud enough for the presets to sound good.
• Dry / wet – The Wet Dry control gradually moves between processed and unprocessed (Bypassed) sound in a very elaborate way. A movement from WET to DRY will gradually open up filters, including the speaker IR, and diminish the effects of modules like Distortion and Codec each in a unique way. The overall result of a movement from WET to DRY is a seamless ‘opening’ up of the sound from the complete preset to unprocessed sound. If, for instance, you have your mix sounding from a jukebox in the back of a bar, you can slowly ‘open up’ the sound to full stereo buy dragging the WET/DRY slider. Or click the right most KICK text to make the slider move from wet to dry, automatically, at a speed determined by the KICK slider.
• Mute on stop – ‘Mute on stop’ means playback of samples from the sample bay will be paused when your sequencer is not playing.
• Speaker – At the heart of the speaker simulator lies a library of recordings of different speakers, often referred to as Impulse Responses, or IR’s.
  When you click a speaker category icon, like the phone or the radio, a browser window appears that lets you select a speaker in that category.
  The impulse responses by themselves capture many characteristics, both in frequency and time, of the sampled speaker. The speaker module lets you select a speaker impulse response, and it shows its corresponding photograph. Double clicking that photograph brings up additional info on the selected Impulse Response.
• Distortion – Emulate a speaker’s or amplifier’s over modulation. In the distortion module audio is first passed through the Pre EQ. If you engage it by clicking its on/off button you can control both a parametric EQ and a low pass filter with resonance in the same graph. Bandwidth, or Q, for the Parametric EQ can be adjusted with the small rotary control. Next, the signal hits the PRE gain, which typically amplifies so the waveform will become more or less distorted in the next module: the Distortion Type. The actual distortion model is selected in the ‘TYPE’ popup. Some are amp models, others are wave shapers, all of them are further controlled using the CURVE graph at the bottom of the distortion module. POST-gain controls the distortion’s output volume. You can also click the connection-button in between PRE and POST to have post gain automatically decrease when pre gain increases and vise versa. Finally you can Mix the distorted signal with the undistorted input signal using the MIX control.
• Mic – Similar to the speaker selector, but here a microphone impulse response can be selected. The available microphone time and frequency characteristics of the microphones depicted, and therefore make it sound as if the selected microphone was used in the result. Use it to make an announcer speak through a typical announcer microphone, or to pick up a guitar cabinet using a classic microphone for the purpose, for instance a Royer.
• Room – Convolution reverb, powered by Altiverb, for room, outdoor space, hall, resonant enclosure, and reverb gear simulation. Room creates reverb based on recordings of actual spaces ranging from a railway station hall to the cockpit of a MIG fighter plane. Samples of spring and plate reverbs and even real outdoor streets are available as well.
• Cover – A variety of objects can cover a sound source. Blankets, suitcases, boxes, glass cups, car trunks, walls are just few. The pitch of these resonating little acoustics can ben adjusted.
• Eq – Five types of frequency filters.  Low and High shelving filters, High pass filter and low pass filter and two bands of parametric equalization with adjustable q-factor.
• Crush – Word length reduction and sampling rate reduction.  Drag the cross hair down to reduce word length (reduce from 32 bit input to 2 bit output). Move to the left to reduce sampling rate. To maximize aliasing effects the most crude of sample rate conversion algorithms lies beneath the Crush module.
• Gate – Classic gate, you can set it to duck or entirely mute the input. This can be used to create connections that drop out, to clean up guitar input, etc.
• Compressor – Emulate the pumping of video cameras, enhance the guitar input signal and there are presets for the extreme types of compression that are present in walkie-talkies and megaphones.
• Gramophone – Gramophone effects simulator.  Influence a pitch curve due to ‘Wow’ (effect of an off-center hole) and Curve (a bumpy record). Also Add ticks and crackles that knock holes in the input audio.
• Leslie – This module emulates a Leslie speaker, typically associated with Hammond organs.  A Leslie speaker, on the inside, rotates a horn speaker for the mid to high frequencies, and it rotates a horizontal baffle below a downward facing low frequency woofer. The result is rich rotating sound utilizing the Doppler effect (pitch shifting that can be heard while a sound source moves to or from the listener)
• Mod – The modulation (mod) module offers five types of classic modulation effects, available in the top left popup.  These are: Tremolo, Chorus, Phaser, Flanger or Vibrato.  DEPTH controls the amount of the modulation effect.  SPEED controls how fast the modulation oscillates. Speed can either be set in FREE mode or in SYNC mode. SYNC ties speed to the host sequencer’s tempo and displays it with a note value.
• Telecom  (Cellular) phone connection protocol simulation. Apart from emulating cell phones the codec can be tweaked to make whispering presets, robots and vocal synthesizer effects.
• Delay – Mono or stereo feedback delay with a high pass or low pass filter in the feedback loop. The delay can be synced to host tempo, in which case the delay time rotary knobs are exchanged by notes. Clicking on a note then brings up a note-value selector box. The Cross feed parameter determines how much of the left channel signal gets fed into the right channel delay path.
• Radio tuning – Simulates the various effects of a radio receiver dial.  Vertical movement of the cross-hairs changes the frequency of inter-modulation side tones, and when the cross hair is moved out of the horizontal center, the reception of the signal worsens (distortion and noise is added).
• Multi LFO –  Four Low Frequency Oscillators (LFO) and two envelope followers (env) for automated parameter control. Simply click and drag a cable to a parameter that you want to control with the LFO. The speed can be synced to the host’s tempo and there is a wealth of different waveforms to choose from.
• Samplebay – You can build complete environments for the speakers right here, via mouse clicks or MIDI.  Several gigabytes of samples and music are installed with Speakerphone, free for use in your production. 5 tables of twelve samples are accessible at a time for playback via mouse clicks or MIDI.  The samples range from extras like knobs and closing car doors to ambiences and music, and they are used throughout the presets that come with Speakerphone.  You can drag samples from the sample bay to your tracks and vise versa. And you can add your own library as well.