Three-Body Technology Cenozoix Compressor (Plugin Alliance)

[midi sentinel]

It came out today.

https://www.plugin-alliance.com/en/prod ... essor.html

Watched the video, it looks really good, I suppose they are going after Pro-C with it

But it can be had for $99 (with 25$ PA voucher), which is considerably less expensive than Pro-C (costs me 143 EUR, on my FabFilter account).

[jamcat]

Antiderivative anti-aliasing. Interesting

https://ccrma.stanford.edu/~jatin/Notebooks/adaa.html

[Ploki]

Looks like what fabfilter pro-c3 couldve looked like lol

[bmanic]

Ok folks. What we have here IS THE BEST COMPRESSOR EVER! Period.

Jeeeeeeebus! I haven't been this impressed by a plugin compressor in a very long time. This plugin manages to be one of the best sounding AND one of the most flexible compressor plugins of all time. It can do literally everything.

I'm almost shell shocked at how good this thing is. Been playing with it now for about 3 hours and I can't stop smiling. It's so ridiculously good sounding and solves a lot of dynamics problems at once, while at the same time also being able to do glueing, tasteful pumping, superbly controllable external sidechain compression etc etc.

I did found a bug though. The Dry/Wet control doesn't work correctly at 8x and 16x oversampling modes. There's really bad phasing happening so it looks like the plugin isn't calculating the latency for the oversampling correctly or then they are silly and use OS filters that cause phase shifts.

Also I found one HUGE annoyance and that is the dry/wet control again. The damn DRY signal gets affected by the makeup gain knob. Yet another developer that falls into this oh so easy to avoid trap. It's just stupid design. Hopefully they fix the bug and give us the option to switch the behavior of the DRY signal.

Other than those two issues, this is absolutely a 10/10, five stars, all thumbs and toes up.
Instant purchase..


.. for 1$.

EDIT: Found another issue. The mid/side modes are not well thought out in the sidechain section. The makeup gain doesn't split into separate mid/side makeup gains as it does in Pro-C thus you have no way of compensating and rebalancing the stereo spread within the plugin.

EDIT2: Nope, I was wrong. You can balance them from the input/output tab in the upper right corner of the plugin. The labels are wrong as they still show L/R when in any of the mid/side modes but they do work correctly, meaning that if you pan the output to the right, you are actually changing the ratio of mid to side towards the side signal (and of course vice versa).

[DCrown]

Plugin alliance, still no good reverb? ,
just another compressor?! Lol
Since the release of RComp
i have not really been interested in
another compressor,
but maybe I will give Xoizceno a try,
I mean it is not aliasing as far as I understand, isn't aliasing the biggest
issue we are faced with, 99% of our time
we have to find solutions and tricks how to
reduce or hide plugin-aliasing?!
I suppose ADAA is transforming aliasing
into a decent flanger sound?

[kmonkey]

Plugin alliance, still no good reverb? ,
just another compressor?! Lol
Since the release of RComp
i have not really been interested in
another compressor,
but maybe I will give Xoizceno a try,
I mean it is not aliasing as far as I understand, isn't aliasing the biggest
issue we are faced with, 99% of our time
we have to find solutions and tricks how to
reduce or hide plugin-aliasing?!
I suppose ADAA is transforming aliasing
into a decent flanger sound?

Do you need medication? Are you ok?

[DCrown]

Plugin alliance, still no good reverb? ,
just another compressor?! Lol
Since the release of RComp
i have not really been interested in
another compressor,
but maybe I will give Xoizceno a try,
I mean it is not aliasing as far as I understand, isn't aliasing the biggest
issue we are faced with, 99% of our time
we have to find solutions and tricks how to
reduce or hide plugin-aliasing?!
I suppose ADAA is transforming aliasing
into a decent flanger sound?

Do you need medication? Are you ok?

Indeed Zenocoix sounds like medication

[kmonkey]

Indeed Zenocoix sounds like medication

Your condition must be a hard thing. I wish you Godspeed in dealing successfully with your condition.

[gondii]

Purchased for $1 with a voucher I still had from over a year ago. Nice.

[plexuss]

It's a good multi-mode compressor with lots of useful contextual features. Gain staging is a bit how ya doin. Of course it's a bit disingenuous to say it was $1 - F29 vouchers cost $29 plus $1 or $30.

[nilhartman]

Ran out of F29 coupon (except if anyone's willing to sell me one ? DM?) so I hesitate to demo it. Unisum, DRC2 and TrackComp are the ones to beat IMO.
I'm always hunting for something that can do what DRC2 does... without the ilok dongle, even if I own and love DRC2.

[DCrown]

Ran out of F29 coupon (except if anyone's willing to sell me one ? DM?) so I hesitate to demo it. Unisum, DRC2 and TrackComp are the ones to beat IMO.
I'm always hunting for something that can do what DRC2 does... without the ilok dongle, even if I own and love DRC2.

Unisum is for mastering first and foremost, lacks character of the known single compressors.
Benchmark for these kind of (versatile) compressors are distressor emus and they have great saturation, not sure whether new pa plugin has saturation at all.
I don't think DMG has a new competitor now, DMG compressor is praised a lot and established, just like Three Body Kirktoff EQ has not managed to dethrone Fabfilter ProQ.
But I can imagine that especially newbies could be tempted to check Three Body plugins, I already have all comps that I wanted.

[nilhartman]

Being a Tone Project beta-tester and a user of Unisum from day 1, I'm well aware of that, even though Unisum can be used with astonishing results on busses and instruments too
If I want a specific color, I'll most likely load TrackComp2 first. Or another top characterful compressor like HCL Islander, Molot GE..
But if I'm honest with myself, I mostly gravitate towards clean compression. Be it in a mastering session or with my own productions.
Nah here I'm extremely interested in the extreme flexibility and pristine sound that this one seems to offer. The emulation bit would be a bonus.

[Ploki]

Looks like what fabfilter pro-c3 couldve looked like lol

I wrote this before i realised it's the same company behind Kirchoff EQ.


Ok so three body tech appears to be on a FabFilter mission.

They take a proven design and layout from FabFilter and cram a fuckload of extra functionality in.

So naturally, i'm exploring this thing mostly as a Pro-C2 alternative first, because the control ranges, layout, GUI, M/S modes and operation/linking, sidechain layout and functionality are all very obviously "inspired" (putting it lightly) by Pro-C2.


From the get go, this thing uses more CPU than Pro C2, when both on clean mode with no oversampling.
With no oversampling, Cenozoix is a smidge cleaner.
With oversampling @2x they're similarly clean. However, Cenozoix uses so much more CPU than ProC2 when oversampled it's not even a comparison.
@2x oversampling, Pro-C2 uses about 7% of my CPU, 10% with UI open, and Cenozoix uses = 50%, 70% with GUI open, nearly 10x MORE.
(I have istat menus set so 1 core is 100%)
And not on the account of being cleaner! Pro-C2 is still cleaner and produces less THD with similar GR and settings...

The Analog models mean nothing to me without suggested ranges like TrackComp has them. (I don't use track comp btw), there's a fundamental principle of interaction with topology that makes a specific sound. It's hard to make Cenozoix sound like a VariMu, because the controls make no sense for someone used to how a VariMu behaves.
I can get Virtual Mu mode Cenozoix to sound close to Pulsar Mu, but the controls to get there make absolutely no sense.
I don't use Mu that way. I use it to quickly get the VariMu sound with the controls that make sense for VariMu, not endless hunt too many parameters so i can sort of make it respond like a Mu.
TrackComp has this nailed down with original ranges with ability to go extended.

FET modes are also decent, but they're completely unintuitive to work with if you worked with any 1176 in your life.

I've played around with it, thrown a few vocals, mixes and some test tones in it and compared similar algos (mAstering ProC2 vs Mastering Mode Cenozoix) and for some amount of GR, I preferred Pro-C2 in most cases, as for analog models it's really hard to compare them. I did manage to smash drums nicely with Blue FET.

I do like the Punch/Pump slider. That thing is great.
There's also neat controls like Clamp.
But somehow with many less controls than Unisum, it's less intuitive than unisum.


GUI quirks:
for some reason release "Hold" is in the bottom bar. I don't get that, it's part of the VCA envelope.
Many menus and windows reopen when you reclick. i.e. you open presets and want to close them - you cant click again on the same preset button because it will REOPEN them, you need to click somewhere else. Or not. Sometimes they close. Really inconsistent.


FabFilter is designed through and through with every detail in mind and it's refined to perfection when it comes to user interaction. Thins thing has little finesse and feels thrown together.
In my opinion, it has the exact same problems as Kirchoff. Boasting some super features (Kirchoff boasted 128bit internal res) and tons of functions, but at the end of the day being a weird clone of Fabfilter.
You can't dethrone fabfilter by being a clone of fabfilter.

Pro-C2 from wish. I'll wait for Pro-C3.

Edit: btw i really wanted to like it because of @bmanic post
It doesn’t sound bad at all, neither did kirchoff.
It’s just not well thought out and with high cpu usage i really dont see what it’s purpose is. For track use it’s too CPU hungry and for mastering there’s better options imo.

[DCrown]

@Ploki very interesting post, I enjoyed reading and a lot of things are obvious without even having to demo it, so you confirmed some of my assumptions.
The very high cpu usage completely disqualifies it and as a mastering comp where one could expect high cpu it won't get a lot of fans imo, because there already are a lot of good plugins and it lacks some features you would expect from a mastering comp and it's not the plugin's focus anyway.