Yes! These two seem quite strange to me! Shapeshifter intrigued me a lot!

 

I know. I put the forum on it years ago. ;) But Arouser is in a League of it's own. If this ever goes on sale I'm sooo gonna get it.

 

Bien vu

 

ACME Opticom and UBK-1 are 2 of my favorite compressors

 

You can also try Zip by Unfiltered Audio. I'm thinking about buying it to replace arousor...

 

What about extremely overly flexible Meldaproduction MTurboComp?
Or
Tone Projects Unisum (latest 1.1)?

About Arousor: VCA
But for me, it can be fatter and dirtier than all VCA designed compressors ever existed.

 

I have tried several compressors these days!... My Trinity are Arousor, Pro-MB and Pro-C 2.. That's enough for me! Thanks everyone for the advice! I tried really weird compressors!
Edit: I would add DMG Compassion, but I don't like having too many plugins!

 

Last edited by a moderator: Aug 26, 2020

Agreed. This is probably why:

 

The best thread necro i've ever seen, thank you steezo, didn't know about the story behind this. what is that 303 hardware they keep talking about, is there a plugin of it?

 

Arousor v3 has an Opto circuit too which isn't in v2

Hopefully we see v3 on the sister site at some point

 

Arousor got the point, compared to all others i tried : SKNote, UBK ...

 

Really enjoy the UBK-1, SkNote DISTO and this new buddy of mine
Arousoir is ok but is nothing like the real piece of gear distressors are kings

Xtressor (kiiveaudio.com)

 

Everyone was raving about Kiive Xtressor as the best distressor clone a few months ago. Any issues with CPU usage, crashes, etc?

 

what protection method does kiive use, and is the free nuke version any good?

 

When i compared Arousor to UBK and SKNOTE, it was better.

Here are some of my notes :
UBK SLY FI Deflector : strange stereo flutter, fuzzy clipping, GUI average
SKNote Disto-R : Too many settings Disto-S : nice ... but Arousor can do the same than both inside the same plugin

Soundwise, SKNote is really good (better than UBK) BUT a pain to use compared to Arousor

Didn't tried XTressor ... for now

 

The volume levels in Xtressor are higher,
but the Compression is harder to actuate, and both Dynamic Response and Color are very different..

It's got some extra Saturation/Warmth controls which are interesting,
but all in all I'd say is a poor imitation..

Waves DPR gets closer, and has some very interesting/special features..


But Arousor rings more True to my ears,
and well they are the makers of the real hardware, it's to be expected

 

Last edited: Feb 22, 2023

The Xtressor sounds great but it's a bit of a CPU hog and it can be a little tricky to dial in with the way that the input/output levels are