Airwindows Console ZERO: Free Mac/Windows/Linux/Pi AU/VST/Rack

https://www.airwindows.com/console0/   / airwindows  

If the weirdness of Airwindows Console systems tends to throw you, it's probably good to skip this one. You'll either hear what it's about… or you won't. This is sort of an extreme position of a line of inquiry that not everybody buys into. It's really quite clear what's going on and why, but people disagree very intensely on whether it matters. Rather than make allowances, I thought I'd push it to the most radical extreme possible to see what happened.

Meet Console Zero.

There will probably never be anything that goes farther in this direction… not in the purely digital domain, anyway. Not as free open source plugins that everyone can have. It's easy to get external hardware to do some of these things, but that's costly. Console Zero can be used by everybody… if, that is, you can deal with the demands it makes.

Console Zero is the Airwindows Console concept, crossed with the BitShiftGain concept, and pushed literally as far as it can possibly go. It has built-in gain and pan… kinda. It has aliasing-suppression filtering… kinda. It does the saturate on channels and then anti-saturate on the buss… kinda.

Everything, everything is sacrificed to the Mantissa Gods. The idea is, with many analog-to-digital converters, with even fairly humble ones you can get quite a lot out of them if you just pass the audio straight through. Analog to digital straight to analog again? Often, it'll capture a really good sound. It all goes to hell when you start trying to work with it in the box.

Even on a system like Console8, with NO other processing, there might be hundreds of mathematical operations on every channel, thousands. Things like sine and arcsine functions do a lot of processing to be accurate. Biquad filters can get you nice accurate filtering, but require lots of math operations to function. The stuff modern mix topologies get up to could be tens of thousands of calculations, PER sample, PER channel on the way to the final mix. We take this for granted and nobody tries to make the opposite approach work, certainly not while including filtering and analog emulation.

Console Zero does maybe eight math operations, per sample, per channel, between input and the final mix output, that touch the mantissa of the input values. INCLUDING the actual mix. Including the Console saturation/antisaturation system. Including the aliasing-suppresion filtering. Eight, if I remember correctly… for the ENTIRE chain.

How? By leaning on bit shifting, to an insane, excessive degree. It's a giant trade-off. All level and pan is done with built-in BitShiftPan. (even on the buss, and you shouldn't touch it… but why not? The point is that it doesn't alter any mantissas). That is mixing in 6 dB increments, 3 if you count moving stuff one notch to the side to make it quieter. The filtering is strictly simple averaging. One operation, and a bit shift to get back the original gain: the bit shift doesn't touch the tone. The Console system is simplified so much that it's just one calculation and another bit shift. Everything is traded off for minimalism. The saturation produces slightly more harmonics than something like PurestConsole, but almost without calculation.

You get a mix together in Console Zero through arrangement, through broad strokes. You CANNOT fuss with it. It's almost LCR panning, except there are obvious left-center and right-center points included, and a range of pannings nearer the edges. All these points sound exactly like unprocessed raw digital audio, all of them pass through the unaltered mantissa from the input sample. The entire mix, with all its levels and pannings, puts through every single track as if it was the untouched raw signal without even a gain change… because there is not a single mantissa change to any track on any channel, going into the Console processing.

This may mean NOTHING to you. If you got here and that's you, thank you for the great patience. And… does it sound good? All of this is in pursuit of a particular KIND of sound, very unlike typical DAW sound. Do you hear that in my example, do you hear it if you attempt a Console Zero mix? If you hear nothing unusual, move on, this is not for you.

Some of you are going to lose your minds over how good this can sound. This is for you :)