Exciter

Overview

An exciter adds harmonic distortion to an audio signal. It accentuates and enhances audio already present, and can provide a simple perceptual boost in presence, or a completely overdriven sound saturated with loud additional harmonics.

Global Controls

LFE Bypass

This button only appears when Neutron is loaded in either a 5.1 or 7.1 surround-sound configuration. When in surround-sound configurations, Neutron processes all channels equally. When enabled, the LFE Bypass will ensure that any audio information in the LFE channel is passed through unprocessed, but with the correct latency compensation.

Pre-emphasis modes

These modes allow you to weight the saturation in or away from different areas of the frequency spectrum.

• FULL Offers a gentle, low-mid frequency bump.
• DEFINED offers a gentle, high-mid frequency bump.
• CLEAR offers a gentle, low-mid frequency attenuation.

Post filter

The high shelf icon overlaid on the multiband spectrum view is a gentle shelving filter capable only of attenuation, to a maximum of -12 dB within a range of 1 kHz to 20 kHz. Drag the filter node to adjust the frequency and gain of the filter, which will be applied to the entire Wet signal, allowing you to further adjust any high frequencies that have been generated by the Exciter module.

Learn

In multiband mode, this searches for natural crossover cutoff points using a few criteria, including minima in the spectrum. Once Neutron has found a stable and transparent place for the cutoffs, the Learn function will disable automatically.

Reset

This will reset the entire Exciter to default values if you wish to start over. If you click this button only to realize how literally unexciting it is, never fear…you can open the Undo History and revert the change to go back to the settings you had prior to reset.

Per-band Controls

Drive

This controls the amount of excitation. Increasing Drive will subtly decrease peak levels for some program material (as would driving a guitar amp hard), but shouldn’t reduce perceptual loudness. It’s that “rounding off’ effect you often hear when overdriving a signal.

X/Y

This allows you to blend between different harmonic profiles, creating unique and as-yet-unheard algorithms. Carefully curated, dynamic constants accurately preserve the non-linearities of the various algorithms while ensuring a seamless transition as you mix between different behaviors in four directions.

Many audio engineers move seamlessly between their various senses, talking in synesthetic terms when describing audio. Subjective mix terms like warm, bright, soft, harsh, red, and blue mean something different to everyone. This X/Y pad helps you dial in exactly what any such term means for you. The four algorithms to mix between are:

• Tube, which is characterized by a clear tonal excitation that emphasizes dynamics and transient attacks and tends to sound less harsh than Tape or Retro.
• Warm is similar, but sounds gentle’ than Tube, as it only generates quickly decaying even harmonics. You may find this gives an intangible life to a sterile-sounding track, particularly a vocal track.
• Tape is a brighter-sounding array of odd harmonics typical of the saturation imparted by magnetic tape machine, but without the crosstalk, hiss, wow, and flutter that might ruin your mix.
• Retro is an edgier, more biting algorithm inspired by transistor characteristics, including a slowly decaying row of odd harmonics. If you like the transistor-based fuzz behind the signature sound of The Black Keys, and a great many records by The Beatles, you’ll dig this option.

Blend

This adjusts the balance between the dry/unprocessed and the wet/processed signal. Oftentimes, pleasing results can be obtained by pushing Drive, but reducing Blend to ensure some clean, clear signal still remains.

Bypass

Bypass the processing for the associated band by clicking the ‘B’ button

Solo

Solo the associated band by clicking the ’S’ button

Add/remove

Add/remove the associated band by clicking on the power button (next to S and B buttons)

Mix

The Mix slider in the signal flow is a highly useful feature, allowing you to do parallel compression. At 100%, you’re hearing only the audio processed by Exciter whereas at 50% you’re hearing an even blend between unprocessed and processed audio. Note that this a global setting, where unprocessed means audio input to the Exciter, and processed means audio output from the Exciter. Audio output from the Exciter may contain some dry audio, due to the per band Blend control.

More Information

When discussing the supposedly magical qualities of any audio tool that adds harmonic distortion, philosophy and experience often give way to conjecture. Harmonic distortion is, to be fair, one of the most enjoyable tools in the arsenal. It’s important to understand and respect that although harmonic distortion was once bemoaned as an artifact of the tape/tube recording mediums of the time, it is now celebrated as a sonic benefit—when used judiciously.

Perhaps one of the more compelling examples is that of tape saturation. Technically speaking, a reel of magnetized tape can hold only so much magnetism. Attempting to add excess magnetism, by driving a signal too loudly into the tape, will cause the oxide particles to saturate, creating typically odd harmonics not previously present. Now of course, such an artifact does not sound good 100% of the time, yet we’ll remember and/or appreciate that there was a time where you really didn’t have a choice, and had to carefully monitor input levels while you recorded to the only medium available: magnetic tape. Nowadays, we’re blessed with the choice of when to and when not to use tape saturation.

Though early digital adopters celebrated the sonic transparency, flexibility, and the unfettered possibilities offered by digital algorithms, this frontier spirit soon missed the sound of ‘home.’ Thus we have for years explored ways to model, replicate, and enhance the wonderful and creative non-linearities of harmonic distortion. Ultimately, products like Neutron offer the best of both worlds: analog-style and digital distortions, from Tape to Tube to Warm and Retro sounds, that take advantage of the digital domain to try some new things not possible in the Analog domain.