D16 Group Antresol Review (Stereo Flanger)

D-16 Group’s Antresol styles itself as an “analog BBD stereo flanger” and is the latest product in their Silverline range, all of which are known and loved parts of my virtual studio.

This is one of the most comprehensive and tweakable flangers I’ve ever seen, and if that wasn’t enough, a subset of it’s features is dedicated to emulating the famous Electric Mistress flanger pedal, known for it’s very musical tone and operation.

Welcome To The Club

Those familiar with D-16’s Silverline effects will be instantly at home with the familiar silver livery but now the GUI features two sizes to choose from, a nice touch if, like me, you have a large monitor. The other distinguishing feature of this line of products is that they hit the features to ease of use ratio squarely on the apex of the curve, giving you everything you’d need to tweak, without bogging you down with things you don’t. Antresol has it all covered for custom flanger sounds.

In Charge

So let’s talk about what you can customise when creating your ideal flange effect in Antresol: You can choose between normal and mid/side mode, the latter really opening up the stereo field and adding a sense of space. You can choose to have a low-cut filter in the feedback loop, allowing you to flange bass parts without messing up the bass response. You can set up the length and properties of the “Bucket Brigade Device” – essentially an emulation of a series of analog components which store and pass on a value to create a delay, but also colour the sound in a pleasing way. You can control how the modulating sine wave is read out, biasing it to be convex, concave or linear. You can control if the mix of the wet and dry signals is affected by the LFO, how much crosstalk between the two channels (L+R or M+S) there is… there are a LOT of little controls which can work together in complex ways, which is explained very thoroughly in the excellent manual. The diagrams here really help, so good job there!

What’s nice about these controls is you don’t have to get bogged down by them, but they’re there if you want to get specific, and the way they work together is quite musical. Take, for example, the classic controls “Rate” and “Amount”, dictating how big the modulating LFO signal is, and how quickly it oscillates. These two values work together such that increasing the rate internally decreases the amount (until you compensate with the knobs yourself) – almost asif there’s only a certain amount of energy in the system and going faster uses more of it, allowing less of an excursion. This is not only more “musical” in some instances, but allows you to easily create automation which is more grounded in real physics. It’s subtle, but a nice touch of physicality.

The Sound

The features are great, and so is the sound. I haven’t heard a real Electric Mistress, so I can’t compare it to that, but especially with the quality settings on high or ultra, it sounds rich, creamy, and at times spacious. The feedback harmonics can sing without sounding harsh, or they can add subtle movement to a part, and anything inbetween It evokes a hardware feeling, for sure, and the extra tweakability allows lots of creative use and abuse of the emulated elements, for effects that can border on analog aliasing (yes, that’s a thing!), fixed formants and stereo widening. I’m not able to describe the sound that well to you beyond a few subjective descriptors, but if you like or use flanging at all, this is worth checking out. It’s not very expensive, either.

Summary

To put it simply, this might just be the only software flanger you ever need. Flangers don’t get a massive amount of love in VST land, so the dedication encapsulated in this product is most welcome, as is the price!

More info: Antresol (€27 during 30% OFF summer sale, €39 regular price)

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D16 Antresol Review

88%

88%

Awesome

This might just be the only software flanger you ever need. Flangers don't get a massive amount of love in VST land, so the dedication encapsulated in this product is most welcome, as is the price!

• Features

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• Workflow

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• Performance

  10
• Design

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• Sound

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• Pricing

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