M Media Audio has released Broadcast Foundry, a dual-channel American tube preamp for Windows, macOS, and Linux. Here’s what they say:
Drop it on the drum bus, turn the input up. That is the whole pitch. The rest is just the session waking up and remembering it is supposed to have grit and weight and now it rules. Broadcast Foundry is a dual-channel American tube preamp – two channels, fully independent, built to put real depth and character on anything that sounds too clean.
Each channel has an Input knob that drives the tube stage harder as you move it up. The saturation is asymmetric; odd harmonics, the kind that add body and presence without adding edge. Not harshness, not distortion, not a sound that fights the mix. Weight. Grit on the drum bus. Teeth in the low end. The kind of thing that makes a mix feel more expensive before you have moved a single fader. That is what the Input knob does, and it does it from the first degree of push.
After the tube stage, a Bass shelf at 80 Hz and a Treble shelf at 8 kHz let you shape the character of what just happened. The EQ is not compensating for the saturation – it is working with it. Pull some low end out after the tube has thickened the bottom. Open the top after the odd harmonics have already added presence. It is a different thing than reaching for those same shelves on a clean signal, and the order matters. Both channels run their own Bass, Treble, and Output independently of each other.
Three Channel Modes determine how the left and right sides relate. Stereo links both channels so they compress and saturate as one unit – the classic bus mode, both sides moving together. Dual breaks that link entirely: two channels with nothing in common, running different Input levels, different EQ, different Output – for M/S processing, for a drum bus where the kick side and the overhead side are going somewhere different, for any situation where left and right are not the same instrument. Mono sums both inputs to center when you need to check the mix in mono or collapse a wide bus to a single point.
Price: $19 for perpetual license with three activations. Demo mode available, no account required. Windows, macOS Universal Binary (Apple Silicon + Intel, signed and notarized), and Linux. More information and demo download at mmediaaudio.com/plugins/broadcast-foundry.
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