Quintuber

Quintuber is an emulation of five popular vacuum tubes found in many types of audio electronics each known for their unique tone and distortion characteristics. These can be used one at a time or dialed in freely for all five tubes thanks to the plugin's flexible parallel processing. An unyielding serial processing mode is also available where each tube's output is fed into the next one.

The plugin covers the following tubes:

• 12AX7, a high-gain staple in guitar amplification. Great for aggressive vocal treatments.
• 12AT7, a tube known for its punchy, airy tone.
• 12AU7, a low gain tube with tons of headroom. Great for subtle enhancement of any type of material. 
• EF86, a pentode tube exceptionally rich in harmonics. Works wonders for vocals.
• 6SN7, found in many hi-fi amplifiers and prized for its linear function. Works best for stereo bus, vocals, and mastering.

To maximize efficiency Quintuber disables processing for an emulated tube when its mix-level is set to zero. The plugin's powerful oversampling options will deal with any aliasing artifacts with ease. Quintuber also offers global controls for input, mix (wet-dry), and output. A look-ahead limiter sits at the end of the signal path with a threshold of -0.1 dB to catch any naughty stray signals. 

A randomize button is there to provide quick inspiration limited to a maximum of three simultaneously driven tubes to avoid excessive saturation.

Quintuber Best Practices

• Use all settings at your disposal to find the level of saturation you need, including global input gain and mix controls.
• The provided serial routing mode is intended for those who need the heaviest levels of distortion. Be careful!
• Observe the output gain light and make sure it stays green (under -12 dB) or yellow (under -8 dB) for optimal operation.
• Only the EF86 provides an emulated phenomenon known as "voltage sag". However, this will affect the whole chain of tubes if EF86 is mixed in and processing is set to serial.
• In some cases switching the limiter off will increase the dynamic punch of the processing.

This plugin has been verified by Pluginval at strictness level 10.

Installation

Unzip and copy Quintuber.vst3 into your audio plugin folder.

This is usually c:\Program Files\Common Files\VST3.