Acon Digital Mastering Suite

Acon Digital Mastering Suite consists of five plug-ins for audio mastering that were designed for ultimate signal transparency:

• Dynamics is a combined compressor, expander or gate. The look-ahead can be set anywhere from 0 to 30 milliseconds and the intelligent algorithm ensures a band-limited gain signal which reduces potential distortion to a minimum even with minimal attack and release times. You can use up to 4 times oversampling to further reduce distortion. The side chain signal can be either internal or external and there’s a full blown side chain equalizer integrated with low cut, low shelf, peak, high shelf and high cut filters. The complexity of algorithms is not reflected in the intuitive user interface which provides graphical visualizations of all aspects of the processing. With the introduction of Mastering Suite 1.1, Dynamics now offers a new auto-release mode that dynamically changes the release time depending on the audio material. A new Range control makes it possible to limit the maximum gain reduction during dynamic processing. Parallel compression is easily achieved using the new Mix knob that controls the mix of processed and unprocessed audio.
• Multiband Dynamics is the multiband extension of Dynamics which allows dynamic processing in up to four separate bands. You can freely set the cross-over frequencies and even the filter slopes can be set freely in the range 6 and 48 dB per octave. Multiband Dynamics operates in linear phase mode to avoid phase issues between the processed bands. Version 1.1 introduces mixed phase filtering which reduces pre-ringing — a well-known problem with linear phase filtering. Pre-ringing smears sharp transients and thus degrades the audio quality. The new Channel Linking parameter controls how independently channels are processed.
• Limit is a transparent limiter with intelligent look-ahead in the range 0 to 30 milliseconds that reduces distortion to a minimum. The limiting is performed in a two step process with a pre-compressor follower by the actual peak limiting algorithm. You can use up to 4 times oversampling for true peak limiting and to further reduce distortion. With version 1.1, the pre-compressor has a new auto-release mode that adapts the release time to the audio material.
• Equalize is a parametric equalizer. Unlike other equalizers, you can freely adjust not only center frequency, gain and bandwidths, but also the filter slope for each band. The filter slope can be set anywhere from 3 dB to ultra-sharp 120 dB per octave. You can operate Equalize as a zero latency plug-in when using the minimum phase mode, choose to preserve the phase relationships in the linear phase mode or use the unique mixed phase mode. The mixed phase mode allows you to set the latency freely in the range 5 to 120 milliseconds while preserving the phase relationships as far as possible. That gives a unique control over potential pre-ringing artifacts which is a common problem with linear phase filtering.
• Dither is a dithering plug-in with flexible perceptual noise shaping. You can adjust the maximum gain and the filter length of the frequency response of the noise shaping filter is visualized graphically.

Acon Digital Mastering Suite is available as VST, VST3 or AAX for both Windows and Mac or as AU plug-ins for Mac. There are 32 and 64 bit versions for Windows. The Mac version is 64 bit and runs natively on both ARM (such as Apple M1) and Intel processors.