Universal Audio 1176LN TDM Mac

This is the TDM plug-in version of Universal Audio's 1176LN FET classic compressor which has been used on countless recordings on voice, bass, everything. I have a project studio with Protools HD on a G4, good mics, preamps, monitors, etc. and record, uncommercially, just about every style of music from classical to jazz to hip-hop to rock, country, folk, dance, film, avant-garde... I use a Grace Design m904 DAC/monitor controller with Dynaudio BM15a mains and a BX30 sub for listening in an acoustically treated space.

As easy to use as the real thing, which is pretty simple. As with so many plugz, the stupid dials "turn" imprecisely when dragging the mouse, there are no text entry boxes or whatever, though I'm sure they can be manipulated better with a control surface (which I don't have). It doesn't come with any presets, which is fine with me. You can engage all four (virtual) ratio buttons simultaneously for a distorted sound, just like the hardware. Parameters can be automated, as with any PT plug-in, though I haven't tried it with this one. I don't know about the UAD-1 version, but the TDM version takes up an entire HD or Accel chip per instance, which is pretty intense for a compressor. It comes with a less intensive version, though, for times when you don't have that much PCI realstate available.

It doesn't quite have the nuance and detail of the hardware, but it comes very close. And it's much quieter, which was an important advantage to me as the harware device hiss always bothered me. I actually sold my 1176LN after I realized that I could do nearly as well, and fifteen times as much (in terms of channels) with the plug-in. (Besides, I needed the money.) After comparing the hardware and the software on the same sources, I could hardly tell the difference in most cases, though the in/out settings needed to be significantly different between the two in order to acheive a similar result. I'm not a fan of plug-ins' sound in general, as compared with the hardware, but this may well be the closest to the real thing I've heard, which is great (in case you don't have experience with an 1176LN compressor). The hardware still sounds a little better at the time of this writing.

I have other compressor plugs, like the UA LA2A, Bomb Factory, Waves, and the UA 1176LN plug-in works best most of the time. The LA2A is smoother, and I've gotten some surprisingly good results out of the much cheaper Bomb Factory Joe Meek, but for clean compression with a little vintage FET character, the UA 1176LN is pretty good.