Metric Halo have released Howie’s 179, available at the intro price of $89.00, increasing to $179.00 after the promotion.
If you’ve listened to top-tier records from the last four decades—from Nirvana and The Smashing Pumpkins to Prince, Daft Punk, and Metallica—there’s a high chance you’ve heard the subtle magic of the NTP 179-120 compressor/limiter. Originally built in 1975 for Neumann mastering consoles, this rare Danish hardware earned a mythical status among audio royalty like Howie Weinberg and Bob Ludwig. Loved for its ability to bind a mix together without ever sounding heavy-handed, it was widely considered the ultimate “unobtrusive” stereo bus compressor.
Until now, getting that exact sound was nearly impossible unless you had access to a handful of surviving hardware units.
To bridge that gap, Metric Halo and Make Believe Studios collaborated directly with legendary 20-time Grammy-winning mastering engineer Howie Weinberg to create MB Howies179. Rather than making a generic “inspired-by” plugin, the developers captured the precise nuance, dynamic response, distortion characteristics, and analog “boxtone” of Howie’s personal pair racked up in his Laurel Canyon studio.
Whether you’re looking to polish a full master, add low-end weight to a mix bus, or inject warm analog glue into a drum loop, Howies179 delivers the depth, warmth, and character that modern digital mixes often lack—all inside a streamlined, modern DAW workflow.
Features include:
- Authentic Hardware Modeling: Meticulously emulates the exact dynamics, saturation, and boxtone of Howie Weinberg’s personal pair of NTP 179-120 compressor/limiters.
- Instant “Glue” & Weight: Adds musical smoothness, low-mid warmth, and cohesion to mixes, master busses, or individual instrument tracks without choking dynamics.
- Streamlined UI: Simplified control layout designed around Howie Weinberg’s 40+ years of mastering experience for fast, intuitive tweaking.
- Modern DAW Advantages: Enjoy full session recallability, flexible stereo/mono instance deployment, and scalable GUI sizing.
- Hardware Zero-Latency DSP: Includes a +DSP version for zero-latency tracking and mixing on Metric Halo 3D Audio Interfaces.
- Cross-Platform Preset Manager: Features the integrated MH Preset Manager for easy preset sharing and management across session formats.
Howie’s 179 is available to PC and Mac users (VST2, VST3, AU and AAX) and requires an iLok account.
For more information on Howie’s 179, click here:
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