Advent Day 9

Today, our Lead Sound Designer Michael who seemed to have fallen in love with incredible audio hardware this year, gives you a quick overview of his latest sound-boosting acquisition: The OVERSTAYER SATURATOR NT-02A

KEY FEATURES:
– Dual channel harmonics and distortion processor
– Tone shaping filters and multiple amplifiers
– Price: 1.800.00€

1. Briefly describe the product. What does it do?

It is a saturator (who would have thought? 🙂 that specifically creates harmonics. Here you get to choose from second order overtones, but you can also connect a circuit that generates third order overtones. Additionally, you can drive the circuits into the clipping.

2. To what extent has the OVERSTAYER SATURATOR improved your way of working?

I can easily fatten sounds. Mostly, I use a plugin (e.g. Trash 2 by iZotope) for individual tracks and the Saturator again for the sum.

3. What are the pros?

The Saturator comes with a large variety of possibilities. It ranges from subtle saturation to total destruction. Furthermore, there are resonating high pass filters available for each channel which allow you to fatten the sounds even more, which is kind of fantastic!

4. What are the cons?

Unfortunately, the controllers are a little too sensitive, but you could talk to the manufacturer and ask for other controllers (for an additional charge, e.g. for stepped controllers). If you use the device in stereo, it is somehow difficult to match the channels. Since I use it in m/s, I don’t run into these problems.

5. What is the Killer-Feature? What do you like in particular?

The blend control is very cool. I can choose extreme settings that would be an overload for the signal in their full amount, but I can selectively mix them with the original sound. This is something I would love to have with all hardware devices.

6. Compared with similar products from other manufacturers. What is better / worse?

This is the first SATURATOR in my studio rack so I can’t compare it to others, I am sorry.

7. The OVERSTAYER SATURATOR is best suited for whom / which area of application?

Saturation is a modulator that serves more or less all sounds to be bigger, fatter or more daring. So to speak: it’s actually good for everything. 🙂 As I am able to create a multitude of different or differently strong saturation effects, there really is everything possible from a single track total distortion to the subtle use of the mix bus.

8. How is the price / performance ratio?

That’s always the thing about hardware… The OVERSTAYER SATURATOR comes at a price of 1800€. You could as well get lots of plugins for this amount. It’s an individual choice and I don’t want to miss my saturator.

9. Your conclusion to the sound designers / BOOM blog readers out there?

Saturation for everyone! There’s almost no field of sound application where a saturator can’t help you in a certain way.

10. How many points do you give the product (0-10) ?

8 out of 10 points due to the controllers.

Your Michael Schwendler

Below are some sound examples, all of them have the same peak level (for better audio quality, download the sounds via the download button in the upper right corner of the Soundcloud player):

1: original sound
2-4: saturation Shape 2 in 2 different intensities and with resonating low cut
5-8: saturation Shape 3 in 3 different intensities and with resonating low cut
9-11: without saturation, overdriven OP Amps
12-14: saturation shape 2 plus overdriven OP Amps
14 final sound (must certainly be compared to the original sound after listening)

OVERSTAYER Website: http://www.overstayeraudio.com