Acustica Audio released Fire The Gold, a freeware saturation plugin.
The color and sound of classic mixing desks are still very much in style. Acustica Audio knows this like anyone else, and is providing Fire the Gold for free.
Fire the Gold serves as a precursor to the upcoming launch of Gold5, one of the larger plugin suites sold by Acustica. The naming convention of Acustica plugins is unusual, but Gold serves as a collection of emulated Neve hardware.
Fire the Gold fits alongside this upcoming collection, acting as the preamp saturation you might get from the 1073 preamp.
In the past, Acustica Audio made quite CPU-heavy plugins, and a common complaint related to the lag and delay present on the controls. You weren’t going to track with the compressor and EQ on Gold3 unless you had one beastly computer.
This has changed somewhat with the advent of Acustica’s proprietary HYPER technology. CPU load is greatly decreased and you could very easily slap multiple instances across a wide mix.
Fire the Gold’s control set is quite slim, with a single knob sitting right in the middle of the user interface. This controls the degree of saturation applied to the incoming signal. I personally found the sweet spot to be around the middle of the knob’s full range.
Also present are interface resizing, a must for modern plugins, and oversampling.
Fire the Gold serves as an interesting preview into one of Acustica’s popular plugin suites. I personally wish they were tackling Sand or Pink next, but having a slightly lighter comprehensive set of classic Neve hardware in your computer is hard to turn down.
If you want to snag Fire the Gold for yourself, you’ll need an Acustica account and to head to the provided link.
After filling in your information, you’ll receive a code to activate Fire the Gold in Aquarius. After that, you’ll just need to enter the code and download Fire the Gold to get to work.
Fire the Gold is available for Windows and Mac computers. Supported plugin formats are VST, VST3, AU, and AAX. It is also a Universal binary, so Apple Silicon and Intel users can join in the fun.
Download: Fire the Gold
