Peak Compressor

I have been a fan of this compressor for many years. Sinus has been great about feature requests that I have sent him. It's a shareware item, so you could use it without paying for it, but why not just buy it? It's very inexpensive and the only way we can keep good developers producing great products is to encourage them with our money. That's what I have done. So, what's it sound like? It really sounds like nothing and takes almost no CPU. It is a very transparent compressor that reacts to peaks using a "look-ahead" process. It's not a tone shaping compressor at all. I select PC when I love the sound of a track but need it to be a bit louder and tame the peaks. It does that flawlessly. Because of the attack speed, PC can be used to smooth out sounds that contain too much attack and not enough body. It's really quite nice on acoustic guitar and voice. It's not my first choice if I am trying to color a track, but to simply control peaks and get more body from a sound, it can't be beat. It also has a brick-wall limiter and dither integrated into it. I believe that Sinus intended for this to be a full mix finalizer plug, but I have used it more on individual tracks. By taking the release out of auto mode, you can get some pretty huge sounds from percussion sources. Another trick is putting PC after another more colorful comp. The first comp shapes the sound and PC evens out peaks and brings up the body. Follow that up with a good EQ, and you have a seriously powerful setup.

The UI is great. You can easily see exactly where your compression and limiting start. His wave display is wonderful and unlike so many others, it doesn't cause a huge CPU hit.

I gave presets only a 9 because I honestly never even used them. PC is intuitive and takes no time to master. It doesn't do everything (nothing does) but it does what it's supposed to do very, very well.Read Review