A community member pointed us at a post on Gil Griffith's Facebook wall where he has updated his profile picture with a small teaser image of a plug-in version of Empirical Labs Distressor, with a link that takes you to a thread on Gearslutz where Dave Derr, who describes himself as 'Distressor's Daddy', has announced an official plug-in version of Distressor to be shown for the first time at Winter NAMM in January 2016. David Derr said....

We started conceptualising the plugin 5 years ago, and have been working hard on it for the last 3 years and have spent oodles of money developing & testing it. So it will be an expensive plugin, but we are going to offer some amazing incentives, and I dare say, I don't think anyone will regret spending the money, especially compared to what similar hardware costs, and especially with the feature set and ease of use this little gal offers. The price to be announced in a couple of weeks.

We created a new division called Empirical Labs Digital Inc which designed this software, and will also do future plugins. You have to have a good math guy to do the DSP that makes "pretty" digital audio. We have a great coder, and I love him because he is a perfectionist also, as well as a musician. But there is no such thing as perfect, and trying to attain it comes at a very high price.

I was lucky to have worked for many years at Eventide, and have always loved digital technology. It's very comfortable for me and I love that some stuff you do in digital is soOOoo easy, but impossible in Analog. And of course, some stuff in analog is almost effortless, but impossible in current digital audio. For instance, the hardware Distressor passes 200KHz. That just isn't going to happen in current digital technology, even at the highest sampling rates. But I say Viva La Difference! Take the best of both worlds.

We understand it will be a Native plug-in supporting all the usual formats like AAX, VST and AU.

Are you looking forward to this? What price would you pay for an official Distressor plug-in?