mix:analog | Elysia karacter Tutorial

Hi everyone!
We've made this short tutorial to get you acquainted with the Elysia karacter (www.elysia.com...) - a Discrete Class-A Stereo Saturator that's just been launched at mix:analog!
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mix:analog is a registered trademark of Distopik d.o.o., an audio technology R&D company based in Slovenia, European Union.

[@RealHomeRecording]

OMG, it's out that quickly? White Sea Studio is going to be happy! Send him a note. :-)

[@bojansernek7459]

you're right

[@J_Dubois]

so sick

[@fernandoborges782]

Perfect

[@bluename4]

is "saturation" synonymous to "distortion" and to "adding harmonics (even+odd)"?

[@mixanalogcloud]

In a way, yes - but saturation is only one of quite a few possible ways to achieve distortion while "adding harmonics" is a natural consequence of any kind of distortion.

[@bluename4]

what do the parameters "Drive" and "Color" of the hardware "Karacter" physically (!) do actually to the acustic material (frequencies, spectrum, amplitude, phase, ...)?

[@mixanalogcloud]

The Color control is basically a tilt EQ (kind of high and low shelf joined at ~1kHz) before the Drive stage which influences how much each part of the spectrum is going to get distorted by the Drive stage. The Drive stage is (probably, haven't delved this deep into the circuit) a discrete transistor stage that operates at a bias point close to saturation, so when you feed in the audio, its waveform gets clipped/folded/altered and thus produces distortion. In an audio spectrum, that manifests as higher-order harmonics dependent on the transistor used in the drive stage and its bias point. That's what the FET Shred control does - it switches the configuration of the drive stage and consequently alters the nature of the created harmonics.