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. And that emotion and confidence is relayed into the mix I'm doing, so whether the people notice or not, it makes a difference.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). It just does its job sublimely well without wanting everyone to know you used it (except when you start pressing more than one ratio at once).ĭon't know any other software emulation that gives me that feeling. It always surprised me how invisible an 1176 could sound (yes insert nerds with better ears than me here), I could often forget I'd inserted one. Every other software emulation I've tried sounds good, but far too obvious. I get the same feeling from the UAD 1176s. It just sounds like a clear vocal, that isn't chocked or smothered. Point is, what I hear doesn't sound rediculous. Occasionally when I get a moment to think, I will glance at the needle showing -8 or something rediculous. Testing aside, in my experience using a silver face urei for tracking vocals, I can set it up and just leave it there. There are usually notable differences between two ureis, let alone between one and a plugin.

1176 compressor plugin comparison