AUDIO DAMAGE KOMBINAT TRI

Now nine years old but sporting a fresh new look and a couple of added features, does this classic multiband distortion still cut through the noise?

Audio Damage are working through the redesign of their sizeable roster of plugins at quite a pace, and here we’re looking at the reinvigorated multiband distortion plugin, Kombinat Tri, previously known as Kombinat, then Kombinat Dva. It isn’t a complete reimagining of Kombinat’s core premise and feature set, with only a few significant additions made beyond the obvious graphical overhaul. However, as it’s been almost a decade since we reviewed the original (10/10, 129), and we didn’t revisit it for the Dva v2 update, we’re going to approach it here from fresh.

Tri hugger

Kombinat Tri is a three-band distortion plugin (VST/AU/AAX) with a multimode filter and compressor built-in, and few would argue that its GUI – adhering to Audio Damage’s new, calmer design ethos – isn’t an improvement over that of Kombinat Dva.

The filter frequency ranges and gain levels of the three bands are controlled in the interactive graphical Crossover display, where each ‘hump’ represents the coverage of its corresponding band, with frequency on the X axis and volume on the Y. Dragging the blended region between two bands left and right shifts the two crossover frequencies: High ranges from 1-10kHz, and Low can be set anywhere from 100Hz to 1kHz. Dragging the top edge of a band up and down, or twisting its Gain knob at the bottom of the interface, meanwhile, sets its volume level, with the range for all three bands being -80 to +12dB. We’re not sure why the crossovers don’t also get ‘mirrored’ knobs.

Kombinat is built for live as well as studio usage, and central to that scenario are the perband on/off switches below the display. Deactivating a band doesn’t bypass its processing – it mutes it entirely, just like hitting a kill switch on a DJ mixer.

“Each of Kombinat Tri’s three bands houses its own independent Distortion Engine”

Band together

Each of Kombinat Tri’s three bands houses its own independent Distortion Engine, drawing on a menu of 13 analogue-style and digital distortion types, each with up to three adjustable parameters, and all designed with

CROSSOVER DISPLAY Manipulate crossover filters and band gains here KILL SWITCHES Mute and unmute each band with their power buttons DISTORTION ENGINES Load one of 13 distortion algorithms onto each band, each with its own control set KOMPRESSOR A...