Heyo! ive had a fair amount of experience with real life units, but am curious about UAD's plugin versions.

Are any of these known for particular use cases? I dont mean LA-2A and 1176 in general, but particularly, Grey, Silver, "Tube", for LA2A, and Rev A, Rev E, and AE for 1176.

Made up example

Grey - great for smoothing vocals and piano
Silver - good for acoustic guitar
Tube -strings

etc...

Anybody got anything?

 

Apparently. The preset lists are different. AE has a 2:1 ratio which I guess would be less aggressive. Some have vocal presets and I think maybe less or none on the others

 

I think it's a bit silly to think that Compressor A is better for vocals and Compressor B is better for acoustic guitar. It might work for people who always mix the same type of music tho (which I would consider to be a rather uninspiring activity, but to each their own). It gets even sillier when you consider that many of the engineers from the analog era didn't have access to the full range of compressors and units that are available today. This is why so many classic recordings were mixed using just one or two different compressor units and a console.

I know this is a bit of a rant and I'm diverging (and if that's a problem, I apologize, I'll ask one of the mods to delete this comment), but I'm genuinely curious about this topic. I'm not sure why so many people put so much effort into learning and getting familiar with so many tools (sounds fatiguing), even different revisions of the same tools, when throughout history engineers managed to get the job done just fine with a highly limited compression toolset. I just don't get it, especially nowadays when we can do that and much more using only a couple good compression plugins. I suspect there's a powerful bias behind this, rooted in the idea that some compressors are supposedly more fit to certain tasks (whatever this means) than others. I don't think this presumption would survive a blind test, but I'm yet to conduct a large scale randomized blind test so, for now, I'll stay with my Ted Talk about my utilitarian perspective on compression.

 

Last edited: Nov 16, 2024

With its control behavior, the LA-2A is perfect for certain signals such as vocals or basses - i.e. sounds that flow dynamically in somewhat freer arcs and do not necessarily follow short, very repetitive patterns (such as hi-hats). So it is no wonder that the LA-2A has established itself alongside the 1176 as the second studio standard among vocal compressors. An apt image that also fits the sound is: the 1176 is the Stratocaster of compressors, but the LA-2A is the Les Paul...

 

Last edited: Nov 16, 2024

^ that is fair point. But if the context is buying some plugins on Black Friday where maybe you get 3 compressors in a bundle, and it is your choice which 3. You would try to get something more targeted to fill in gaps in your existing plugins.

Or maybe you like to have a big template setup. You can dial in anything getting something to work, but maybe you want something more specific in those spots, since you know what instrument type will usually be hitting that bus, chain, whatever. I guess that is kind of the same thing, just two examples.

 

Last edited: Nov 16, 2024

how can saw this like that? i only found load a simple vst in studio one, nothign else... the synth have the presets view only.. windows11

 

I think its a new feature from UAD. They didn't have it in the old version I was using... You have to click where it says 'Default' and that opens the box in Ableton. Maybe that's an Ableton feature, I don't know.

I've noticed in my Apollo menu they changed the list to look similar. Maybe its a new feature then???

 

They must have modeled specific Revisions of those compressors..

Some could be an "average" aproximation I guess,
but i'd say many devs go for specific units/models..

If the Revision is not specified in the GUI or plugin itself,
it could be Documented in the manual or elsewhere..

I never used UAD plugs mysef tho so I'm not familiar with their methods..