![]() Very exciting and yes, has its place in many a healthy mix. For those of you who use the popular Waves Vitamin Sonic Enhancer, this again is a variation on the same theme. SPL, for instance, has developed both hardware and software ‘ Vitalizers’ which push the simple exciter up the audio evolutionary chain. So it would seem in light of this that exciters might well have passed their prime.īut consider this: Aphex are still making their hardware– now more than a million units sold worldwide-, Waves has a very successful Aphex Vintage Aural Exciter plugin modelled after one of the nearly extinct original 402 units, iZotope’s Neutron 3 and Ozone 9 software have multi-band (and multi-option) integral exciters and many, many other software developers offer exciters as standalone plugins or as part of multi-use plugin/software offerings. Modern digital noise floors being what they are (almost non-existent so far as human hearing is concerned), we can hear many simultaneously occurring elements distinctly and well, though each element might have been recorded, minutes, hours, months or even years apart. The third and final point against using an exciter would be that exciters add artificial content and don’t actually bolster the original timbre of our audio so this can be considered a bit of technical fakery which doesn’t always go over well with the purists among us. As a second point, our TV/web-based broadcast chains– another place exciters sometimes found a home- are almost completely all digital now too and again, there is no need to correct for analogue signal losses. So, this magic box was invented to add ‘air’ and ‘clarity’ to a mix and one might think this begs the question: Why wouldn’t we use an exciter on everything we mix? For one, the digital age has eliminated the need for any sort of clarity boost since the quality of our recordings doesn’t change over successive playbacks because the medium doesn’t physically degrade linearly. If you want to read a little more about the early history, check out this article. Aphex’s Aural Exciter even garnered some album credits early on which is still rare for any piece of gear. Initially tube-based hardware, the Aural Exciter model 402 was lauded for bringing clarity and air to analogue recordings by adding phase shift, some compression and most particularly, harmonic and intermodular distortion to the sounds it processed. Though originally discovered accidentally decades earlier in the 1950’s, it wasn’t until 1974 that originator Curt Knoppel brought the idea to Marvin Caesar of Aphex Electronics for commercial development. Starting in the mid 1970’s with Aphex Electronics’ Aural Exciter, the technique of ‘exciting’ odd/even harmonics has been employed to overcome the dullness that could seep into analogue tape over multiple playbacks or just to add lustre for effect. Early exciter units were tube-based, using a triode tube type to hype the gain. ‘Drive’ adjusts the density of the added distortion and ‘Mix’, the amount. Since exciters add harmonic distortion, this is sort of a ‘base frequency selector’ since the distortion carries on up through the spectrum. The ‘Tune’ knob allows the user to select the frequency at which the exciter starts to work. Traditionally, hardware units had three main controls: Drive, Tune and Mix.
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