It really didn’t handle the transients well. I think we have a very clear loser here, which is the Platinum Digital. Below is the unprocessed drum room mics recording from the same performance as the one above: One of the things mixing engineers love to do when mixing rock or metal drums is to use a compressor to smash the drum rooms, and not every compressor works well for that. Some say that makes the drums sound thicker, which is fair, but I think it’s fair to say most of these compressors are good for drum bus compression. I just don’t like it when the snare is sticking out or when the kick gets smeared or saturated, which by the way, can be the effect some people are looking for. This really marries the snare and the kick, and it glues the whole drum kit together. I like that the cymbals aren’t affected by the snare and kick transients much, and I like that Studio VCA squeezes the whole drum kit in a very clean and transparent way. I really like that it kind of chops off the snare transients a bit like a clipper and in a very pleasantly aggressive way, while maintaining the clarity and punch of both the snare and the kick. My personal favorite is the Studio VCA and it’s for a few very specific reasons. They are all slightly different and I can see someone liking any one of these over the others. The rest of the compressors are very close. Its release is just not fast enough and I’m not a fan of the pumping effect it has on the drums, but that’s just me though-I know some people like some pumping on their drums. Immediately, I didn’t like Platinum Digital at all. They have plenty of low frequency jumps and they are very dynamic. In this comparison, we have some fast metal guitar riffs that contain a lot of palm mutes. I just used the same settings for all for demonstration purposes. Now of course I know with different settings you might get better results, because if these plugin emulations are anywhere like the hardware counterparts, their attack and release should be all different from one compressor to another, even at the same values. My main problem with them is that they don’t sound as smooth as I want, and you can sometimes hear the compressor coming in and out. I thought the Platinum Digital and the Classic VCA sounded the worst because I could hear very noticeable volume drop whenever there is a loud part, and I could hear the vocal levels fluctuate quite a lot, which is really not ideal for vocal compression.Īside from the best and the worst, the rest of the compressors all sounded pretty similar to one another, and they sounded okay. The Studio VCA also adds some really nice harmonic saturation to the vocals, making them a bit warmer and thicker. I liked the Studio VCA the most because it was able to drastically reduce the dynamic range of the vocals and really flatten them in a pleasant way.Įven with 20 dB of gain reduction, the vocals sounded really smooth, which is exactly what you want for great vocal compression. To my ears, the Studio VCA is a clear winner, and the Platinum Digital sounded the worst, with the Classic VCA sounding the second worst. In the vocal comparison, I’m using a vocal recording from my friend Alex, who’s also the vocalist of my band. I have set up the audio players below so you can easily switch among different compressors and compare them. What matters is knowing how these compressors sound and behave, so you can choose the right one for the right audio source. It doesn’t really matter what hardware compressors the Logic compressors are based on. There’s nothing more important than putting plugins to use and judging solely by how they sound in audio production. Because optical compressors are tube compressors, they also add some nice tube warmth and saturation to the audio. Optical compressors are known to be some of the slowest kind of compressors, but the nonlinear behaviors of the attack and release make people love optical compressors for their musical and smooth compression. However, Logic’s version does have all these controls, so I’m assuming it’s not supposed to be an accurate emulation, but more like it’s inspired by it. There’s no control for attack, release or ratio. You can easily spot an optical compressor by its lack of controls-it’s main controls are usually just a gain knob and a peak reduction knob (and an output knob but that’s not as important).
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