ELEV8

The big gold dial. One number for ELEV8's measured mastering dynamics, tone and glue: 0 is off, 100 is the full treatment. Most masters live between 30 and 70.

Opens the stereo sides. 0 keeps the image as recorded; turn up for air in the sides without touching the centre.

Three gentle tone moves in dB: low shelf around 178 Hz, mid bell around 636 Hz, high shelf around 10 kHz. Centre is flat, double-click resets.

Peaks of the output signal, flowing in from the left. The fill under the wave grows denser with fine grain as CHARACTER and the tone dials add harmonics: a picture of the density, not a measurement. 1x / 1/2x sets the speed, the snowflake freezes the picture. Here the scale zooms to each example; the plugin draws a fixed -30 to +2 dBFS.

The small dial at the top right: level after ELEV8 in dB. 0 is unity; trim it to match the bypassed level for a fair comparison, or to leave headroom.

IN and OUT show peaks in dBFS for left and right on a 36 dB scale (all values below 0). The number holds the highest peak for 1.5 seconds. On OUT, click the number to switch between TP (true peak after 4x oversampling, held 3 seconds; keep it under 0 for streaming) and PEAK (sample peak). The red lights above the bars latch when a channel reaches 0 dBFS, in TP mode also at 0 dBTP: click the bars to reset them.

The pill at the top right switches the whole plugin, level-matched and click-free, to compare before and after.

The particles around the big dials breathe slowly and flare up briefly on kicks and snares at the input. Pure display, nothing in the sound.

Without a licence the plugin runs in demo mode: a short gap in the sound every 20 seconds. Click the DEMO field and pick the .licence file from your order. One licence works on two computers; LOG OUT frees a slot.