About Stoneye Sound

About Stoneye Sound

Stoneye Sound is a one-person writing project about the tools and habits of mixing and mastering. It reviews audio plugins, equalizers, compressors, saturation and clipping tools, reverbs, metering suites, and the odd channel strip, and it writes about the parts of the craft that do not fit in a plugin manual: gain staging, how to read a mix before touching a fader, when a limiter is doing you a favor and when it is lying to you.

Where it came from

For a number of years I ran a small commercial recording room. Tracking bands, cutting vocals, the usual. That room is closed now. Rent went up, the work moved to laptops and home setups, and I found I preferred the mix stage to the tracking stage anyway. The gear stayed. So did the ears and the habit of writing everything down. This site is what those notes turned into once there was no console to sit behind every day.

How the reviews work

I buy or license most of what I test, and I say so on the page when a company sends a copy instead. Every plugin gets used on real sessions before I write a word about it, usually across a few different sources so I am not judging a compressor on one kick drum. I care about a small number of things:

• What it actually does to the sound, described plainly, not the marketing version.
• CPU cost and whether it plays nicely in a full session at low latency.
• Whether the workflow gets in your way or stays out of it.
• What it is genuinely better at than the stock plugins most people already own.

If something is overpriced for what it delivers, I say that. If a free tool beats a paid one at a specific job, that goes in too. I have no interest in pretending everything is a nine out of ten.

Who it is for

Home engineers, people learning to master their own records, and working mixers who want a second opinion before spending money. The writing assumes you know your DAW and roughly what a compressor is for. It does not assume you have read every forum thread ever posted, because most of them are noise.

Contact

Corrections, disagreements, and requests for what to cover next are all welcome. There is a contact form on the site and comments are open on most posts.