Compressors pretty much all sound very similar unless your obsession lies with compression. There are better ways to spend your money on plugins IMO. Definitely there can be differences, but using 2 different synths will give you a huge amount more difference than same synth with 2 different comps. There's also a lot of advertising and hype about things like saturation etc. You have to really hit a compressor to get any amount of saturation you can actually hear. I still occasionally use my old LA4C when I want to really scrunch things up or do some character heavy bass compression or fancy frequency specific compression but if I'm really honest - at normal compression levels I can't hear the difference. At all. So I use stock plugin compression 90% of the time and am perfectly happy with it.
I tend to use TDR Kotelnikov rather than stock Cubase ones but that's more for the features, such as delta for actually hearing the compressed portion and for choice of RMS, peak etc, fancy shaping options etc. But again...for a couple neat digital dB gentle squishing of an every day synth sound or even already-processed drum samples...not enough audible difference to waste your money on fancy comps. The point of difference where the average punter is going to hear the difference is something like slamming a drum buss to smithereens. And that's more akin to outright distortion, which is not my thing. Also GUI makes a difference - compression can be a lot more intuitive if a GUI clicks well, so I have to admit GUI is part of my reason for using Kotelnikov too (and I have to say that Reacomp GUI is fugly in the extreme...where's the barf emoji?)
From what you say...stick with Reacomp, save your money. I use Cubase and it has several compressors, most of which I don't even use. I have 3 hw compressors from years back and I don't even use 2 of those because the hassle just isn't worth it for infinitesimal gains. Not saying these fancy comps don't do thing ever so slightly differently, but unless you're obsessed with it I suspect you just won't hear it. TBH I class Eq in the same bucket. Most differences are down to q settings rather than actual sonic difference. Give me 3dB Eq gain at identical width on 5 different plugins and I have no idea that they're not the same. Desks are obvsly different - mostly because of q at normal usage.
I tend to use TDR Kotelnikov rather than stock Cubase ones but that's more for the features, such as delta for actually hearing the compressed portion and for choice of RMS, peak etc, fancy shaping options etc. But again...for a couple neat digital dB gentle squishing of an every day synth sound or even already-processed drum samples...not enough audible difference to waste your money on fancy comps. The point of difference where the average punter is going to hear the difference is something like slamming a drum buss to smithereens. And that's more akin to outright distortion, which is not my thing. Also GUI makes a difference - compression can be a lot more intuitive if a GUI clicks well, so I have to admit GUI is part of my reason for using Kotelnikov too (and I have to say that Reacomp GUI is fugly in the extreme...where's the barf emoji?)
From what you say...stick with Reacomp, save your money. I use Cubase and it has several compressors, most of which I don't even use. I have 3 hw compressors from years back and I don't even use 2 of those because the hassle just isn't worth it for infinitesimal gains. Not saying these fancy comps don't do thing ever so slightly differently, but unless you're obsessed with it I suspect you just won't hear it. TBH I class Eq in the same bucket. Most differences are down to q settings rather than actual sonic difference. Give me 3dB Eq gain at identical width on 5 different plugins and I have no idea that they're not the same. Desks are obvsly different - mostly because of q at normal usage.
Statistics: Posted by kritikon — Sat Jun 29, 2024 2:28 am