Additionally, it’s not always easy to make up the lost gain after you trim it back to get the compressor to behave as you want. The Zener Limiter has an unusual gain structure, and when compressing complex material like a full-on rock mix, it’s not always easy to keep it out of compression without turning something down in front of the limiter. This limiter sounded cool, but it took a bit more manipulation of the track to make it do what I wanted. It had a nice “glue” to it as well, which is probably attributed to the numerous tubes in the signal path it recreates to convincingly.

This one sat somewhere between the previous two, with a slightly creamier sound and a smoothness to the high end compared to the Alpha Master but it was perhaps a bit less thick than the Shadow Hills. Even though neither gain reduction meter was moving much, the mild compression was still pushing things together nicely. This could be attributed to the output transformer I selected (“Iron”) and the fact that there are actually two compressors running in series here. This compressor seemed a bit thicker and slightly more forward-sounding. The mix seemed slightly clearer with this compressor, which allowed me to hear more detail within the stereo image, specifically on the percussion. Since I’m only compressing slightly, it was more about the clean signal path than the sound of the gain reduction circuit. This one sounded stiffer and more high-fi than the others-though not by a lot.

There were definitely subtle variations in tone, but for the most part it wasn’t black and white, like “this one sounds the best”, or “this one will never work”. When they’re barely working, the differences between them all were somewhat insignificant. Once I had setup all 11 compressors to a very gentle setting (about 1dB of gain reduction) I was a bit surprised.

I had to ensure that my assessment was as objective as possible so that you could know that I wasn’t just trying to steer you toward what I prefer. I used a 400Hz tone to make sure they were all nearly identical in terms of gain reduction and output level. I painstakingly set up each compressor as identically as possible, with regards to threshold, ratio, and attack and release times. I have a bunch of 2-mix-worthy comps at my disposal and have used them all at one point or another with some success, so it knew it wouldn’t be hard to clearly show what each one does on the same piece of music. When I set up this shootout, I had a clear process in mind and was pretty sure I knew what kind of result I would achieve.

1176 compressor plugin comparison