Lindell Audio 80 series review: Analog sweetness in a box

For more than 50 years, Neve has represented the highest tier of professional audio design and engineering. The 80 series Neve analog mixing desks have attained a cult-like status due to their sound, uniqueness, and rarity.

Famous institutions worldwide like Sound City Studios, Oscilloscope Labs, Electric Lady Studios and Sphere Studios have implemented Neve in their environments, which proves the omnipotence of Neve. Lindell Plugins has created an exacting emulation of the original 1073/1084/2254 and 1272 Neve line amplifier module in a digital environment, which is now available through Plugin Alliance. Lindell Plugins is a joint venture between Lindell Audio and LSR Audio.

Their renowned plugins are based on actual hardware units. The 8028 has a marvelous and unique sound that has been used by the likes of Queen, David Bowie, Nirvana, Red Hot Chili Peppers, and Slipknot.

Plugin Alliance is the provider for high-quality software audio products that rival their hardware counterparts. Unlike UAD or Slate, no subscription or external hardware is required to use their plugins. The ease of use and high-quality standard of their products has made Plugin Alliance one of our favorite “Über-standards” (as they put it) in the industry today. Gone are the days of needing an extra DSP box to run your plugins- Plugin Alliance software all runs natively and allows for additional installs to your other computers, which is a great added bonus.

Lindell 80 sounds marvelous on guitars. We put it on our Guitar bus to glue the sections together and do some subtle dynamic processing as well as EQ. The EQ, compressor and gate all work very smoothly and sound great. The output, input, gate and compressor can also be driven for a more harmonically rich sound.

Lindell Audio 80 Series has TMT, which is a new process of analog modeling plug-ins which feature differences caused by component tolerances as you would get in real hardware audio equipment.

The Lindell 80 comes with 32 channels which all have their own subtle differences and characteristics. Checking in Plugin Doctor, we could get a sense of the subtle differences from channel to channel and it was nice to confirm that we could visually see the differences in the Linear and Harmonic Analyses. Having worked on a Neve console before, the channel strip is really impressive. We can only imagine the amount of labor that went into creating such a detailed and complicated plugin.

The plugin also features parallel mix control, Oversampling from 2x up to 16x, a resizable GUI and more! The features to control noise and harmonic saturation are especially nice.

We think the Lindell Audio 80 Series is the best Neve emulation on the market. Reasonably priced at $249, you can save yourself $10,000+ on an analog console and mix from the comfort of your DAW. Plugin Alliance also recently endorsed an updated version of the famous Shadow Hills Mastering Compressor that we’re excited to try out!