I still remember the day that I heard the drum beats coming out from all these vintage samplers in the studio of New York, like the Akai S950 or the classic MPC machine, it was so fat, bold, larger than life yet organic. A lot of major records were programmed on those sampling machines. It took me years to understand and realized the AD/DA converter is what gives them their signature sound. Fast forward years later, all the beat makers, myself included, are still trying to match that tone/sound within our DAW with the help of various lo-fi, clippers, distortions, compression plugins etc.
There’s where the Inphonik RX950 comes in handy, it puts all the missing pieces together. It’s designed to mimic the whole AD/DA conversion process of the Akai S950 in order to give your music this vintage, warm and crunchy sound.
The GUI was very simple and organized, it looks like a 1U analog rack mount piece with 4 knobs that covers all the functionality. The font of Inphonik RX950 reminds us it’s a remodel of the classic AKAI unit. The adjustable size also fits whatever screen and resolution you might have equipped, a thoughtful feature.
The 12 bits resolution is still unmatched today as far as the grit and crunch, it adds so much character to your generic sound. It doesn’t stop here, a combination of “Audio Bandwidth” (equivalent to the sample rate function of the Pro-Tools Lo-Fi plugin) and Input gain, that’s my favorite recipe for adding vintage flavor, additional punch and analog coloration to mostly my drum and bass! That organic high cut EQ with a subtle aliasing effect (because of downsampling), plus a bit of analog distortion in the circuit, instantly makes anything going through it sounds like they are created from a vintage sampler than your modern DAW. The original steep 6th-order low-pass Butterworth filter adds additional flexibility in terms of further processing your signal and can be put on any output bus or master section for a subtle high end roll off.
To conclude, besides my beloved Pro tools Lo-fi plugin, this would be an alternative go-to plugin to add that classic converter sound to your productions or mixes on any DAW. It has a beautiful tone and color and it’s user friendly. Unfortunately it only supports 64-bit machines, if you have an older machine that’s running in 32-bit you should be aware of this.