I was kind of expecting you to pass on the curves option after a good nights sleep, but apparently a curves display is coming!

Here are my current thoughts about what I think is coming based on 10+ hours on the V2 beta and a 2 hour call with Z yesterday:

1) The curves display will be optional. If you want to avoid getting too cerebral, no problem, flip a button and it's gone. What I do to stay in my right brain amid excess visual information is I close my eyes when making critical decisions. Lights out, problem solved.

2) The original P440 V1 curves are strictly proportional Q. Since prop Q bandwidth essentially remains the same as you boost, this means smaller boosts have a wider Q and bigger boosts have a narrower Q. I find prop Q works best when cutting (ie: digging into pressure points without taking neighboring elements), whereas the opposite, called inverse proportional Q, tends to sound better when boosting complex material.

One of the reason why the Sontec EQ is such a flattering EQ across nearly every mix is because it uses inverse proportional Q curves that get wider as you boost - the bandwidth to frequency ratio increases with gain. This tends to respect mix decisions to a higher degree than prop Q does.

Long story short, inverse prop Q is now coming to P440 on a per band basis via a switch at the top of each band. And more importantly, your boosts retain their Q state (prop or inverse prop) independently from the Q state of your cuts. This means we can create a preset for example that simulates a Sontec for boosts, and a SPL PQ / API 550 for cuts, or vice versa, and the state will toggle automatically when you cross from + to -. And you can mix and match per band according to your most common usage.

IMO this is a huge workflow enhancement and now you see the sudden urgency to see the curves..

3) P900 mentioned that P440s engine was first used as the starting point of P450/455's EQ, but a few discoveries were made during P455's development that he now wants to port back to P440. One feature called Smoothing (of the analog randomization or chaos circuit) actually took P450 further away from MDN's and P900s ear preferred state, and closer to a pure digital sound. It was recently added to appease more users despite its departure from the vintage sound.

However when I heard what Smoothing does in P440, suddenly the minimum phase EQ loses much of its analog effect (not all of it) in favor of greater coherence and source accuracy. Do we need another pure IIR EQ? No, and that is not what P440 in Smooth mode does, but instead it finds a mid point between a stock IIR filter and PM's bespoke coloration which P440 V1 had in spades.

I personally like having both options (Stepped and Smoothing) in P440 more than I do having them in P455/P450.

4) When P900 was working in the low sub octave of P450 he discovered a secret which he has ported to P440's Tremor. In use I hear a more center rooted power with a slight resonance (glow), while remaining very firm as Tremor should be.

5) Soul + O2 has not changed, however with Smoothing turned on I am finding that there is more nuance to its usage when needed. The OG Stepped mode has Soul+O2 in a more aggressive stance that can instantly resurrect a sleepy mix (by filling harmonic voids), however Smooth mode takes Soul+O2 in a new direction as a low level enhancer that preserves louder elements like punchy transients and soaring solo instruments. As a result, we can now use Soul+O2 on more material than ever before, and in a way that no other plugin that I have found can do with such ease. I have always liked Soul's character but it was a bit heavy handed in mastering before this.

I am so impressed by this upcoming release that Im motivated to make a video explaining what P440's 'feature interactions' mean to me in daily use (a non technical explanation), and then maybe another video showing how I use P440 across a few masters. The last thing I wanna do is get on camera explaining a plugin, but this has inspired me greatly. And for the record I get nothing from PM aside from the NFR P440 license I got a while back during beta. PM plugins are the gift that keep on giving and Id like to contribute some of that back in my own way.