Peacock

Make it sound like a record

Peacock can be used on a stereo bus to create the classic vinyl sound. On individual tracks it is also very useful in creating large fat sounds, smoothing of the harmonic content and making a nice smooth vintage sound on vocals and other instruments.

There are three main controls: Harmonic, Dynamic and Color.

Harmonic control

The Harmonic and Dynamic controls interact and control the level of the harmonic distortion.

Dynamic control

The Dynamic control is the tricky one. What it does is time modulate the distortion components which are very frequency-dependent due to the RIAA curve. There are two main components that cause time modulation in a vinyl record. The first is due to the cutter and the playback stylus not having the same shape. This is called tracing distortion. The other is tracking distortion due to the playback systems misalignment and the inability to perfectly follow the groove in the record.

The amount of time modulation with the Dynamic control is level dependent and has a maximum range. It is a matter of finding the control position that is optimum. Pushing it to higher levels creates ugly sounds. The code prevents this. The plugin can introduce large amounts of second harmonic distortion resulting in a large, fat, smooth sound.

Color control

The Color switch changes the character/interaction of the controls and sets the maximum amount of midrange/LF color and the HF compression characteristic. The Dither control adds noise that is the spectrum of record noise. It modulates some of the internal functions an adds dither to the audio path at a level for 16 bit dithering Color = Gold is an extremely close match to the test material which is a record and the original wave file. It has been optimized at 96 kHz but will work fine at other sample rates. The Silver setting is a lighter setting and coloring increases in the order of the settings: Silver; Gold; Rich; Fat; Deep. Silver is also the brightest setting.