New Music Gear Monday: Ayaic Ceilings Of Sound Pro Hyper-EQ Plugin

When it comes to plugins, it seems like all the ones based on vintage analog gear are just about played out. Today’s engineers don’t have the same affinity to analog and their emulations that the classic engineers had, and are looking for things that are a modern mix of control and speed. I think that the Ayaic Ceilings Of Sound Pro Hyper-EQ plugin fits into this category nicely. Even better, it’s part of the latest field of intelligent plugins that are able to do much of the work for you, if you want.

Ceilings Of Sound (COS) is basically an EQ but with either 31 or 50 bands that are further controlled by 15 “ceiling bands.” It has a very functional real-time-analyzer at its heart that allows you to conform the EQ to the curve of a sound or song, then transfer that onto another one that you might be working on. You can then manually control the various bands from there to provide any final tweaks.

Hats off to the Ayaic design team for making COS very easy to use. The plugin revolves around two selections in the top menu. Auto Generate Ceiling is used to automatically set the plugin’s ceiling bands to the incoming sound source. Once set, you can drag the bands to whatever shape you wish to drive the EQ. You can also change a band’s frequency and slope by typing in the frequency and selecting a slope from the Slope display. From there you can check your tonal balance against some built-in noise guides that provide pink and brown noise selections.

When you’re happy with what you have, then click Conform Spectrum To Ceiling and the EQ then conforms to the ceiling shape that you dialed in. While the default will use 31 frequency bands to conserve computer CPU, you can expand the EQ definition by hitting Ceiling Edit, which then enters the EQ Edit mode. From there you can select 50 bands by toggle the 50/31 Bands switch.

There are hundreds of presets supplied to get you started, but you can also generate your own if you find EQ curves that you’ll keep coming back to. While you normally have to hit Conform Spectrum after every EQ adjustment to hear it, there’s an Enable Auto Conform selection that will automatically do the conforming so you hear the preset adjustment immediately.

Finally there’s an output level volume and level meter to be sure that the plugin remains free from overloads.

Ayaic Ceilings Of Sound is available in a number of versions. The basic version is limited to only 5 EQ bands and retails for $99. V2 provides 7 ceiling bands and click-n-drag ergonomics for $129. Ceilings Of Sound Extended gives you 15 ceiling bands and and the”auto generate ceiling” function for fast preset creation for $149, and the Pro version includes 15 ceiling bands, the auto ceiling generator, the 50/31 band linear graphic equalizer and the conform spectrum to ceiling function for $199. There’s also a trial period to check it out.

Find out more on the Ayaic website or watch the video manual below.

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