The month just gone had us escaping the madness of modern reality with these splendid new music technology releases.

Apple Unleash The Beast

Announced at their ’Peek performance’ event on March 8, Apple’s Mac Studio looks to be the Apple Silicon-powered computer that demanding professional producers have been waiting for. With the form factor of an almost-triple-height Mac mini, and centring on a single or ‘dual’ M1 Max CPU – the latter putting two of the things on a single die and dubbed M1 Ultra – boasting up to 20 CPU cores and 64 GPU cores, plus a 32-core Neural Engine and up to 128GB RAM, it’s an absolute monster, blowing away all previous Macs in every meaningful metric. A generous I/O layout adds to the appeal, with four Thunderbolt 4 ports, two USB-A ports and an HDMI port, 10GB Ethernet and a high-impedance headphone minijack; and despite all that horsepower, the Mac Studio is also, it turns out, impressively quiet.

Starting at £1999, at this point in time, the Mac Studio represents the pinnacle of Apple Silicon technology, and we can only imagine what’s coming next with the transition of the Mac Pro away from Intel. Having said all that, though, as Russ recently pointed out, the average M1 or M1 Max owner needn’t feel too much FOMO, as their laptop likely exceeds their day-to-day needs already.

Launched alongside the Mac Studio, the new Apple Studio Display represents a, er, more affordable (at £1499, plus another £400 for a height adjustable stand!) alternative to the £4599 Pro Display XDR. Early reviews of that one aren’t overly positive, though, citing the so-so 60Hz panel, dreadful webcam and inexplicably high price as reasons to steer clear. Sheesh…

PSP AudioWare Re-Dress To Impress

Essentially a new and fully redesigned version of their classic MixPressor, PSP’s Impressor is an analogue-style compressor plugin that can emulate tube, opto and “classic modern” designs, with a choice of brickwall limiting or soft saturation at the output, and a selection of fixed knee shapes and ratios. Attack, Hold and Release times are fully adjustable, as is the sidechain input filter, and the detection circuit can be switched between RMS and peak modes.

So far, so MixPressor, but the upgrades are numerous. For starters, Impressor is VST3 compatible – good news for Cubase 12 users – and includes a 4x oversampling mode and support for sample rates up to 400kHz. It also adds a feedback option on top of the existing feedforward mode, and high-pass and ‘equal power’ types to the sidechain filter, the second for use on complex material. Then there’s a doubling of the available Auto attack and release modes to four each, channel linkage control, and general algorithmic tweaks throughout.

Fans of MixPressor will be champing at the bit to give Impressor a try, and we can report that the systemic and QOL improvements are well worth the upgrade fee. For newcomers, meanwhile, this is a superb and versatile virtual compressor that demands to be tried.

Arturia Smash It

Grenoble-based music tech leviathans Arturia might be best known for their superb classic synth, keyboard and effects emulations, but they do occasionally pull a completely original concept out of the bag, too, such as the excellent Pigments synth, Delay Eternity delay, and the just-released Efx Fragments.

Efx Fragments is a granular synthesis effect with which a wide range of audio-mangling processes can be brought to bear on your instrumental and vocal tracks, from slicing, glitching and repitching, to the formation of shimmering ‘grain clouds’, responsive ’sprays’ and bizarre textures. The intuitive interface keeps the workflow smooth and speedy with all the essential granular synthesis parameters housed in three discrete sections, and two further sections are given over to panning and a pair of insert FX slots, and a deep modulation setup comprising macros, LFOs, an envelope follower and a sequencer. It’s the sort of plugin that any electronic or ambient musician could lose themselves in for days, and you can see and hear it in action in Luke Goddard’s video.

Cherry Audio Realise Their Dream

The latest addition to Cherry Audio’s rapidly expanding roster of consistently on-point virtual synths is a love letter to the groundbreaking hybrids of the late ’80s, referencing such legendary digital/analogue-crossovers as the Ensoniq ESQ-1 and Sequential Circuits Prophet VS.

Dreamsynth revels in its old-school hardware inspiration with a gloriously busy interface that puts every control at your fingertips in a single screen – and there’s a lot to get your hands on here. Three oscillators each blend two waveforms, drawn from a vast library of samples or the usual array of algorithmically generated analogue waves, and can be layered and/or split across the keyboard with an entirely independent polyphonic ‘top octave divide’ string synth section. A 12dB/octave analogue state-variable filter enables morphing from low-pass to high-pass through notch modes; modulation comes in the form of three LFOs and two envelopes; there’s an Arpeggiator and five effects – Distortion, Phaser, Mod (chorus/flanger/rotary), Delay and Reverb – for performance and processing; and MPE is supported for controllers and DAWs that cater to it.

Sounding fabulously evocative of the era in which it’s rooted, but offering plenty of modernisation via the PCM waveforms and effects section, Dreamsynth is a characterful workhorse for basses, leads, pads, strings and FX at a price that can’t be argued with.

Waves Clean Up

March saw Waves release a new utility plugin that aims to make life that bit easier for podcasters, dialogue editors and musicians by magically eliminating noise from vocal recordings through the clockwise rotation of just a single knob. A cut-down version of the feature-packed Clarity Vx Pro, Clarity Vx is built on the same Waves Neural Networks machine learning engine as its big sibling and optimised for the instant reduction of fan, traffic and other environmental noise without affecting the sonic integrity of the vocal itself.

What sets it apart from the competition is that it works entirely in real time, with no pre-analysis of the input required, and the results, as Luke Goddard’s testing in his article Waves Clarity Vx Realtime Noise Reduction Tested For Music demonstrates, are amazing. Unsurprisingly, this being Waves, it’s ‘currently’ on sale for a huge saving on the regular price… Our Post Production Editor Damian Kearns put the Pro version through its paces in his article Waves Clarity Vx Pro - First Look At AI Noise Reduction For Post.

What new goodies grabbed your attention in March? Let us know in the comments.