Elysia Karacter Review | Reviewer's Revival

Elysia Karacter (Exciting Deep) Review

Elysia Karacter Master

"Affectionately known as ‘The Coloring Box’ by its fans because of the various ways in which it fattens and adds sparkle to tracks, karacter’s unique sounds separate it from the pack."

A few months ago, yours truly finally started to catch up with the rest of the audio-engineering world, in regard specifically, to the usefulness of saturation plug-ins. Frankly, I had been guilty of dismissing their practicality for anything other than electric guitar or perhaps keyboard tracks.

Thankfully, I’ve seen the error of my ways and have come to appreciate what a bit of harmonic saturation can do for lackluster audio material. And whew, was it ever good timing because Plugin Alliance released yet another Saturation accessory into the already well-saturated marketplace. *Deliberate pun intended.

The question I immediately posed was: “Is this just another ho-hum, hum-drum distortion plug or is the name on its tin aptly deserved?” I’ve been bench-testing Karacter over a period of a few days, comparing it to other Saturation plug-ins that I have on hand, and I’ve concluded that it imparts smooth, controllable harmonic color and character – it does so very nicely indeed.

Karacter is not actually a single plug-in; herein are two iterations of the processor banded together. First, there’s the Mix variant tailored for individual track tasks. Its larger, more feature-laden compadre, Master, is geared towards BUS duties, or even full mix processing.

Maybe it’s just my age showing, or perhaps it’s all the time and effort that we engineers have put into trying to “clean” things up, but me thinks that $199 (USD)** is an overly aggressive price point for a Saturation/distortion plug-in. Stick n’ stay – hang out with yours truly for a few minutes, and let’s find out if the steep MSRP price tag is merited.

**Excluding Plugin-Alliances special sales and bundle offerings - which by the way, there’s a sale ongoing at the time of this publishing: Get Karacter for $129.

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