New Music Gear Monday: Kazrog True Iron Transformer Emulation Plugin

One of the things that automatically happened during the old days of analog “big iron” consoles is that you got heft and weight in your recordings almost without trying. We can still get that today in our home digital worlds, but it takes a bit more of an effort to get there. That’s why whenever there’s something that promises to get that girth for us a little faster most engineer’s are pretty anxious to sign up. True Iron from Kazrog was developed to simulate the sound of transformers that we love so much in a plugin form to give you that “big iron” sound.

True Iron provides the sound of 6 transformer emulations in one plugin. The models are based on on transformers used in vintage hardware that are thought to impart the most pleasing sound to an audio signal path – the UTC 108 X (used in Ampex and Universal Audio gear), Malotki E4M – 4001B (Neumann, Telefunken), Western Electric 111C, the Haufe V178 (Neumann, Telefunken, Siemens), Marinair LO1166/A (Neve), and UTC O-12 (UREI).

The plugin is dead easy to use. Select one of the transformer emulations from the Voicing selector, then dial in the Strength. This adjusts the nonlinearity of the virtual transformer to allow boosts and cuts in warmth while maintaining the large headroom that classic transformers are known for. A Morph button also allows the Strength control to adjust the even-order harmonics as well.

The Voicing selector also has a DNA control, which provides an enhanced level of frequency response modeling based on co-developer Devin Powers’ individual transformer stereo pairs.

A Crush control adds warm overdrive or distortion, emulating the sound of transformers pushed beyond their intended operating range with up to 48dB of auto compensated gain in the 2X mode. There’s also a Unity/Boost control that sets the impedance of the virtual transformer. Unity is meant to be used across a stereo mix buss while Boost is is made for individual mono instrument tracks. Mix and Output level controls complete the user interface.

True Iron is a low CPU footprint plugin by design, and is intended to be used on every track and/or buss in a mix in the signal path before other processors in order to mimic the input stage of analog equipment.

The plugin is available on all platforms and formats and costs just $39.99 with a free demo version available. Find out more here or in the review video below.

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