Acustica Audio Blond 2023 [WiN]

With 4 plugins based on nearly impossible-to-find Italian-made hardware from the 1950s through the 1980s, Blond takes you on a fascinating sonic journey through the Bel Paese of yesteryear.

This unique plugin suite that embodies unbelievably rare hardware units manufactured in Italy up to 60 years ago. Some of these have earned an excellent reputation in the pro audio industry over time, while others are known only to the most discerning collectors; as such, they have acquired nearly mythic status.

As difficult to track down as these machines might be, we did exactly that, and sourced these obscure, beautiful machines. Thanks to the Blond plugin suit, you can take advantage of these rare sonic options not available anywhere else, making your mixes sound stunning.

What You GetBlond includes 2 Equalizer models:

EQ Model A: An extremely transparent 4-band EQ, with 24 line-mic preamps that faithfully recreate the 1970s console experience as intended by one of the greatest Italian designers in music history. We sampled this vintage console at L’Amor Mio Non Muore, a boutique studio near Forlì, a picturesque medieval town in the heart of the Italian countryside.

EQ Model B: A transparent “Sontec-style” 4-band parametric EQ from the 1980s that works wonders while mastering. It’s transformer-based, juicy preamp offers you tons of sonic character to have experiment with.

It would be an understatement to call this module an EQ. We feel that “Pre-Mixer” better describes the creative potential of this powerhouse of a processor. Based on unusual Italian-made studio units from the 1960s, 70s, and 80s, its distinct palette of tones will function as a “mojo booster’ for your mix. These basic, solid-state tubes, or FET units, show a heavily non-linear response, which means their effect is big and bold. Warning: Don’t be scared if your analyzer goes haywire!

A witch says,

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

The Acustica developer is repeatedly complaining that R2R de-GoogleSnappy-ed and that kills optimization.

We don’t say their “optimization” (compression) is wrong, but we also don’t say that uncompressed version is slower. It actually perfomed better in R2R members’ computers. It depends on the spec of the computer and the way to measure the performance. Compression tends to result better performance when the file-reading is slow. HDD and NVMe can make significant difference.

Anyway, compressed or not, R2R image will be loaded while legit one is still being processed by RC4, VirtualDLL, AES/RSA crypto. No need to argue about the compression. The point is legit users are having much worse experience.