2008 EDITORS' CHOICE AWARDS

Jan 1, 2008 12:00 PM, By the EM Staff

           
 

As EM editors, we are in an enviable position: hundreds of new products are introduced each year, and a majority of them cross our desks. Although testing tons of gear isn't all fun and games — how many manuals do you want to read a year? — the biggest reward is finding something that knocks our socks off, either for its sound quality, feature set, innovativeness, or just plain coolness. To recognize these standout products and the manufacturers that make them, we created the Editors' Choice Awards.

Each fall, we select the crème de la crème that we've tested in the past 12 months based on our own experiences as well as those of our writers. (It is impossible to thoroughly test everything released in a year, but we make an effort to check out the most promising candidates.) All of the winning products have been field-tested by EM's editors and a select group of authors, with additional feedback provided by the editors of our sister publications Mix and Remix. The final selections were made by EM technical editors Mike Levine, Dennis Miller, Gino Robair, Len Sasso, and Geary Yelton, with much-appreciated help from EM editor in chief Steve Oppenheimer and Remix technology editor Markkus Rovito. All of the award-winning products have been covered in EM reviews, or the review is in progress and our tests are far enough along that we feel confident about our conclusions (see the sidebar “The Award Winners in Review”).

To be eligible for an Editors' Choice Award, products must have shipped between October 1, 2006, and October 1, 2007, when we began editing our January issue. We also considered several products that shipped close enough to the 2007 Editors' Choice Awards deadline that it was not possible for us to test them in time for that year's awards. If a product shipped too close to this year's deadline for us to properly evaluate it, it will be considered for an award next year. Awards are given to software upgrades only if we think there were major improvements over the previous version.

And now it's our privilege to introduce to you the winners of the 16th annual EM Editors' Choice Awards.

ANCILLARY HARDWARE

Dangerous Music D-Box
($1,699 [MSRP])

Though Ancillary Hardware may sound like a boring category, there's nothing dull about this year's winner, the versatile Dangerous Music D-Box. Dangerous Music has a reputation for making high-quality products, but many of them are priced for the pro-audio market rather than the personal studio. But with the introduction of the 1U D-Box, the company has combined some of the key features of two of its top-shelf products — the 2-Bus and the Monitor ST — into a single, surprisingly affordable unit.

Analog summing is touted by many as a way to improve the sound of DAW mixes, and the D-Box offers eight channels of it. But summing is only part of the D-Box's story. Dangerous Music has also included a comprehensive monitoring section that offers speaker switching, D/A conversion through its digital inputs, a talkback mic, an input for an auxiliary talkback mic, an input selector, simultaneous input monitoring, and headphone outputs.

When you consider the D-Box's versatility, compact footprint, vaunted Dangerous Music quality, and reasonable price tag, you've got yourself the makings of an Editors' Choice winner.

ANCILLARY SOFTWARE

Redmatica Keymap
(Mac, $273 [MSRP])

Keymap grew out of the need for more convenient and sophisticated multisample editing and mapping in Apple Logic's EXS24 sampler. Although it still targets the EXS24, Keymap has grown into arguably the most advanced utility for creating sampler instruments.

Keymap is useful with any sampler because it is a standalone application, and it imports a variety of audio file formats and exports AIFF and WAV files with looping and multisample mapping information. Samplers that import EXS24 instruments (as most major samplers do) get the full benefit of Keymap's advanced multisample management.

One of the program's standout features is harmonic resynthesis, which lets you modify a sound's pitch, formant, amplitude, and time parameters in the context of a multisampled instrument to shape a new, but still coherent, multisample. A variety of easy-to-use looping algorithms help you identify optimal loop points quickly. Automatic pitch detection algorithms let you create multisample maps in a fraction of the time it takes to do it manually. If you're tired of the tedium and limits of working with multisampled sampler instruments, Keymap will lighten the load.