Acustica Audio Honey 3 2023 [WiN]

Honey 3 packs all the power and musicality of a world-class American console that’s consistently been put on a pedestal by industry professionals thanks to its musicality and logical layout. Since 1975, numerous top-selling records have been crafted on this impressive piece of audio equipment, including gems such as Michael Jackson’s “Thriller,” Paul Simon’s “Graceland,” as well as hits by AC/DC, ABBA, Queen, Led Zeppelin, Genesis, and countless others.

Honey 3 includes 4 separate plugins: A “homebrewed” version of a famous EQ (“classic”); a faithfully-reproduced “vintage” version of the same unit; a VCA compressor; and a channel strip that includes select modules, carefully curated by the Acustica team.

Here’s what comes inside the suite.

Classic EQ

This is our “homebrewed” version of a celebrated American EQ that first appeared on the market in 1975. We began by building the hardware unit itself from the ground up, and then proceeded with the process meticulous sampling. A result is a high-quality plugin with a very sweet top end, ideal for bringing every element of a mix into focus. (We encourage you to indulge in its delicious preamp stage, which is an essential component of the global tone of this particular equalizer.)

Vintage EQ

We sampled an original American-made console, using a new, machine-based approach that guarantees exceptional accuracy. With its character-rich sound, delicious filters, and wide, smooth response, Honey 3 Vintage EQ is the closest digital version of this EQ that is available on the software market.

Instant Gratification VCA Compressor

This VCA design offers faster envelope times compared to any other compressor of its kind. It’s the perfect choice to add depth and glue to your tracks or mix bus. And as it’s based on a “feed-forward” compression type, it has more in common with modern designs than some of our other vintage compressor plugins.

A witch says,

Library is completely decrypted, decompressed, DRM related bloat removed, and built to the clean one

R2R – Acustica Side Story :

Because there are too many human errors in their software (wrong file, broken crypto, broken TOC, non used files…) we had to code own verification tool for their products. While it really helped us rebuilding the libraries, it also annoyed us by finding too much errors made by Acustica.

Judging from their code, they hate to handle the errors. For example, if there were missing files in the user installation, it just crashes or shows null GUI without notifying the acutual error. Their activation can lead the crash when its license file is not for that computer (it fails decryption and program reads broken data). We assume they don’t make verification tools for their products to assure the quality.