The Sound Board

FabFilter has today released the next major version of Saturn, their multi-band saturation and distortion plugin.

https://www.fabfilter.com/products/satu ... on-plug-in



The highlights of this release over the previous version include:

• 12 new distortion and saturation styles (28 in total)
• Overhauled user interface, which, apart from generally being sexed up, includes much welcome visual feedback showing how modulations are affecting targets in realtime
• Additional control over envelope modulation curves
• Side chaining can now input from other bands in the instance (in addition to external side chain or MIDI which existed in the previous version)
• Adjustable crossover slopes, from 6 to 48 dB/octave
• Linear phase processing
• Up to 32x oversamping
• A new "unrestricted feedback" mode which allows infinite self-oscillation, which I'm sure is useful for something but I haven't figured out what (sound design?)

List price is $154 USD but existing FabFilter customers get the usual personalized discounts according to how many plugins you currently own, with a steep discount for existing Saturn owners. (My discounted upgrade price was $53.90.)

Upgraded from Saturn 1 to 2 at $53.90 It's a pretty good deal, and lots of new features added in ver. 2

I tried the demo and didn't note enough audible distinctions from Saturn 1 (which leaves out the prettier GUI) to make me think I HAD to have it right now. I was mainly interested in the new distortion models, but none of them seemed very compelling to me. I'll probably still get the upgrade the next time FabFilter has a sale on, though ... since with just a little bit more of a discount, the upgrade price will enter the realm of "impulse buy" for me, and at that point even just the improved GUI would be sufficient motivation.