db-cell is the underlying technology that powers the "analog" side of our digital products. Without giving away the secret sauce, it's everything we've eliminated from hardware and software in the last 20+ years: the noise floor, the hysteresis, the way we never quite get a clean 60Hz/115V, the way tolerance of electronics parts has greatly improved but durability of parts has not followed, the way everything in a circuit changes when it gets louder. It's noise in all sorts of ways, and it's the imperfections in circuitry. We figured out how to build back everything modern engineering has removed — by deliberately over-engineering it back in. It's kind of like vacuum tubes: when you run sound through them, it changes the sound slightly, adding and subtracting from it in measurable ways.
When you have a studio — or a home studio, like most of us — you have electricity going in and, hopefully, good sound going out, because we're all becoming better and better audio engineers. You have thousands of parts inside your gear, and some of that has a voltage noise floor of its own. Some of it acts like a radio antenna and picks up RFI. Sometimes, if you're unlucky, this manifests in the audio realm as audible noise — sometimes it's simply white noise, or a flavor of it. Some gear does a good job of filtering it out with output capacitors. But everything analog has a noise floor, and that's measurable. Everything is imperfect, despite the published specs.
Think about it: every time you hear a record, it's different. Not just the pops and clicks in the vinyl's surface — the room changes, the air pressure drops when you open a window, sound bounces around when your dog walks in. Every time you hear a sound, it's not static — it's an evolving thing. Sample it a thousand times, or a million times, and you can get a pretty good idea of what it actually sounds like on average. When was the last time anyone sat perfectly still in the precise listening position between two speakers?
We found out early on that injecting db-cell into the system at various points improved the sound and made it non-repeatable — especially true on our "analog" synthesizers. It's just the way it sounds. That means every time you play something through a plugin with db-cell turned up, it's a different outcome. We also use it in other ways to disrupt the perfect digital 1s and 0s and make them bend to the analog side — they don't want to, believe me.
In short: it makes the sound imperfect, and that's what our ears appreciate — more imperfection.
If you're a developer making plugins or anything in the audio field, hit us up — we'd love to license this technology to you under NDA. It's CPU intensive, and worth it.
Click here to license db-cell technology inside your plugin, turning them as analog as possible