Thermionic Culture Vulture
Customer Reviews
Thermionic Culture Vulture
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S. Goodison
Very happy with this!
There seems to be a lot of negative reviews for this plugin and I don't know why. I love using it on bass and anything with super high end information like overheads. It really shines for parallel use. Kick, snare, vocals, guitars and bass all benefit from some of this added in to the path in parallel. Very happy with it, the only thing I don't like is how much CPU it takes up, but I tend to have it first in the chain on instruments so it's easy enough to print and then disable.
H. Zwarts
Awesome
Sounds just awesome and is not like all other distortion plug in.
You should only use a little of it to make it sound great.
D. Tarqua
Thermionic Culture Vulture Review by D.Tarqua
I bought the plugin as I was looking for a very special Guitar Sound that I could not get with the Amp simulations and it worked fantastic. I was looking for a overdriven distorted but highly sophisticated sound not a Heavy Metal sound. The Thermonic provided exactly the controls I needed to do this. In the meantime I use it not only on guitars but on a variety of instruments and even vocals to add spice or richness to the sounds. Just used it on a Hamond and that was just gorgeous to emphasize the Hammond Sound even more.
What I did notice tough is that I primarily use the P1 distortion sound as I actually don’t seem to like the others. I try them often but then always revert to the P1.
I love it :-)
P. Geiser
AMAZING
my absolute favorite plugin that i've gotten from Universal audio. super duper colorful and powerful. not a crazy amount of flexibility but still very useful and exciting
A. Ali
Great sound
It has a great sound, not entirely useful on everything but for things like Bass and thickening up Vocals it really shines.
I've found that you can hit the sweet spot for sounds rather early on and it's quite easy to go overboard and use too much distortion; but when you hit that sweet spot you know that you couldn't have gotten that sound elsewhere.
To summarise I really like this plugin, less is more and it doesn't work for all applications but it has great character.
S. Fusco
Very similar to hardware
I had the thermionic hardware and at its best it would provide some subtle natural warmth at lower levels. It was never a box I would go to for extreme levels of distortion but that's not what this product is all about.
The plugin is about 90% of the hardware. Though I will say the range for the various settings is different between hardware and software. Like 5 on the drive for the software seems like 8 on the drive for the hardware
All in all, a solid effort for UAD. I wouldn't buy another hardware vulture as its value was marginal to me but as a 300 plug it might be worthwhile.
G. Piazza
Please don't review based on DSP usage!
Caveats:
I do not yet own this plug-in or the hardware, nor have I demo'd it.
BUT, I have to chime in here on all the reviews complaining about too much DSP usage.
As most professional engineers know, the main point of having UAD cards is to facilitate unrestricted plug-in development. I.E. no compromises circuit emulation.
To me, it is a good thing that UA are developing plug-ins without concern for DSP usage.
Think about it - if you want 'efficient' plug-ins (that often sound so-so) then buy something else.
Eventually, UA will release UAD-3 cards, and we will be glad they did not compromise to save DSP.
Until I try CV, 4 stars for ignoring the 'too much DSP' blowback.
J. Roger
Grew on me.
I didn't like it at first, but as I played with it over different sources I started to really like it. For more subtle breakups and harmonically enriching a source, it sounds really really great, and will make something fatter and pop out a bit. For heavy distortion I still am not a huge fan, but it isn't bad by any means.
It is hard on processing, but I'd rather UAD keep making plug-ins sound better at the cost of DSP, than the other way around. It's not that hard to commit to and print a sound with this
You gotta play with it to get into it, don't go by the examples in the video.