TAN

Nice analog compressor, looks and sounds good (very clean and transparent) and also offers simplified parallel compression with its "Dry/Wet" knob. Only has fixed Attack (0.1, 0.3, 1, 3, 10, 30), Release (0.1, 0.2, 0.4, 0.8, 1.6) and Ratio (2/1, 4/1, 8/1) values, so it might not be something for everyone.

It has a small and barely visibile gain reduction meter to the left side, but at least it got one. The plugin is IMHO beside the fact of not being resizable not too big and not too small for modern desktops. I like the horizontal space it occupies on my screen and fits with that maybe in a good spot, where other plugins wouldn't be that good. Especially when you have several GUI of plugins loaded, this could be efficient.

There is also a pre-amp lever on the right side, which to be honest, I can only hear a very subtle difference with which seems to glue the signal more together. I like it but it is very subtle. Maybe it just works belong to knob, but I'll try to find it out in the future. The manual does not say much about.

Speaking about the manual, you can download one at the TAN page in the "Aquarius" installer but it's really made in rough style despite giving you some decent numbers. Probably the roughest manual I've ever seen for a plugin. It's intended to look like that obviously.

Downside is clearly the installation process, which probably is also the reason why this compressor isn't more popular.

You have to create an Acustica Audio account and install the "Aquarius" installer suite from Acustica Audio to get it to your computer. But that's not the only problem. You only can find plugins inside of the "Aquarius" app by a search bar, which works bad. Sometimes it encounters what you want, other times it presents you something else or it just works very laggy.

Acustica Audio itself states at their website regarding the app, "Having a reliable fast internet connection is mandatory." - Another thumbs down from me for that at this point.

Having found the plugin, you can choose whether to install in VST2, VST3 or AAX in 64-bit to a specified location. I wanted the VST2 version (since my Ableton Live 9.7 does not have VST3 support), but interestingly Live couldn't recognise it. So I decided to install the VST3 and bridge it with vst3shell, that did work and so I use the plugin in this way.

Another thing ist that you actually get 2 plugins, TAN and TANZL (which probably stands for TANZeroLatency). I tried TAN it is gives me (52.2 ms, 2459 samples) latency. That is way too much for my use of it. I guess this is also why they created TANZL, with whom I get (2.8 ms, 132 samples) latency, which is fine.

So, if you dare to pass over the stoney path of installing that plugin properly, I highly recommend you to only use the TANZL version.

CPU usage: TAN 5-6%, TANZL 6% (quite much for both in comparison to other competitive plugins)

I won't give it 3 stars, because I actually quite like using TANZL for its clean sound, space and feeling.