Does anyone find it strange that we spend hundreds of dollars on DAWs such as Cubase Pro and then turn right around and spend hundreds more on audio plugins? Why do we do this? Aren’t the plugins that come with Cubase or other DAWs good enough? I moved from Sonar to Cubase a few months before they became Bandlab. Writing music in Cubase has been a joy but I really haven’t done much if any mixing in it. Nor did I do a lot of mixing in Sonar. My point is, being a mixing novice, how in the world would I know if the plugins provided with Cubase are any good or not? In the majority of mixing videos I’ve seen on YouTube where people are mixing with Cubase, they are using 3rd party plugins. Probably would make out better just getting the barebones sequencer and adding your plugins to it.
Many are good enough, some aren’t. I think the EQs, Compressor, Limiter and DeEsser are perfectly fine for professional use, but they’re pretty ‘clean’. So in addition to plugins that give a lot of color there are also reverbs, and between coloring plugins in general and reverbs “hundreds of dollars” isn’t really that much. Actually add special plugins like restoration and it’s even more.
You probably wouldn’t. But it’s not a big deal. Get a tool (Cubase), learn to use it, see what you end up with. Step 2, download a 3rd party plugin, run it in demo mode for a trial period and test it against what you already have… evaluate… That plus experience gets you to the point of knowing what you think is good enough.
That would probably be more expensive and more work. Also, if they released a version without the bread and butter plugins then it’d look weak. I don’t think it would be competitive.
At this point it really doesn’t matter, they’ve already developed a large amount of perfectly good plugins, so to me at least the only question is if it’s worth (Steinberg) spending money on developing new plugins instead of dealing with bugs and poorly designed features. In my opinion the latter is far more important.