If you’ve spent a lot of money on plugins then you may want to stop reading now.

We decided it would be fun to ask a top engineer and mixer, grammy winning in fact, to mix the same track twice. First mix it with your favourite premium brand plugins and then mix the track again using just the plugins you get with a Pro Tools. It’s hardly fair is it putting things like EQ7, DYN3, and Dverb against what are premium plugins but we thought, what the hell?

To be clear, this wasn’t a case of trying to match the settings on each plugin. It was mix the track twice and see what happens when you don’t have access to, in this case, over $2500 worth of premium plugins.

We’re not going to name the brands used, this isn’t a case of ‘don’t waste your money’, we don’t believe that and there’s a lot of great plugins out there worth investing in. It’s more a case of ‘what can stock plugins do when in the right hands?’

So here is the same mix twice and we want you to answer two questions. The first one, which mix do you think is which and secondly, which one do you prefer?

We’ll give you the results in a week or so, unveil the mixer and have him tell the story of being part of this experiment. UPDATE - Here are the results