I respect all opinions but this, is a stupid debate lol. I mean, Slate who? hahaha...
Waves are the inventors of the audio plugin as we know it 33 yrs ago and never stopped renewing their catalogue ever since. Nuff said.
Cheers

 

Gotta agree with Nuffy: Waves plugins are rock solid. Overall useful tools and lots of them. If i need analog flavor i would not look either for Waves and Slate. I'd Rather use Nebula, PSP and PA/FAL. My wife Buffy also like Waves plugins, even tho she's not an expert. But still make some fire EDM tracks with Waves plugins. Nuff Said!!!

 

If I absolutely had to pick, it'd be waves. Slate makes some decent compressors, but as far as everything else they make, I don't find myself reaching for it as much. Just RBass alone from Waves makes them the choice for me, cause I use that on pretty much everything I make ever! But I might add that I make hip-hop/trap, so if you're making something like Rock or something with more of a live instrument heavy sound, you might reach for something else. I wouldn't know.

Also, I do think limiting yourself to one or the other between these two is not the way to think about it at all though. Just my two cents.

 

Waves quality plugins is not bad as Slate to me..just a simply choice…
I read about good vibes only for waves and not for slate …
I tought slate was a good quality plugins even a good economic choice because the everything plan includes also the everything ssl. Yes, is ilok and not cracked yet…
Maybe the waves choice is the one because they are always up to date at sister site?
As a mac user i will never buy again a single waves plugin since this company is a scam with update plan is a shame and i use to uppdate only few plugins, i own the legit horizon bundle and some recent plugins…i own the everything bundle by slate and sll and sincerely…
No waves no slate..im a ssl user now

 

Don't know about R2R but with VR's waves use can use waves central as you would if you were rich. Tick the boxes of just the ones you want.

 

you can always try UAD native. they sound pretty good. but all of them are just ok if you don't know what you're doing. none of them are magic bullets. sister site will probably have you covered for all save for UAD. Waves ditched the vst2 in their last upgrade so i'm kinda letting them go. I have way too many old mixes with waves vst2 and there's not 6months going by where i don't get a recall from clients so i can't justify keeping a machine just with those or having to go back and forth installing old and new versions. So until they get a way of converting automatically my vst2 to vst3 i'm not going forward with them. great plugins though. have been my main workhorses for years, but this vst2/vst3 broke the camel's back (they also did that with dx but that's before my time.). So now I turned to UAD native and have been getting good results (same I did with waves mind you. just different scalpels)

 

It's funny that you mentioned VCC because it was the plugin that made me pissed with Slate for the first time. The tape for me was instacrap, i never used it but it suffers from the same evil. But i used VCC quite a bit until i started comparing with HW and other trusted plugins.

Man, that shit distorts badly. I never met any HW that distorted that much in normal conditions (maybe a Mackie??). It alters the source too much with a mushy and soundgoodizer style of distortion. I don't even know how to describe, but if you're familiar with Slate plugins you know what i'm talking about. It's not even digital waveshaper style of distortion (Airwindows use waveshapers on their Channel emulations, and i like the sound). It some sort of gimmick they put on the algo that makes it sound like total crap. If i bought some hardware distorting that way i would probably put it on revision to check if everything was ok.

Generally i don't throw that amount of bad opinions on plugins, but i'm jus trying to advise someone to A/B Slate plugins if you like it to check if that sound is really what you're looking for. For me, nah.

 

imagine praising bloatware

 

Imagine people spending thousands of dollars to buy it. (Acustica). You don't need that great of an imagination.

 

Waves gets a ton of unjustified hate. When I worked at a recording studio, Waves plug-ins were used regularly.
That doesn't necessarily mean they're better than Slate, but they certainly have more variety and are used in a professional setting.
It's a boring answer, but true - whatever plug-in you learn and get used to is the best.