slate digital FG stress

[jonalyn]

it is 49$ actually, good or bad deal ?

[Effectsworks]

Good deal!

[Funkybot's Evil Twin]

It's a good compressor. Hate the mix rack but would use it more often if not for that.

[poshook]

Good deal, FG Stress is excellent emu, low CPU load, fast results

[Aloysius]

+1 on the mix rack hate. It's a real turn off.

[poshook]

yes, mix rack is a pain in the ass. Mix rack modules are top notch by the way. As standalone plugins I would prefer them in most of the situations.

[TheD20]

Thanks for the heads up on this! Seems like a great price actually!
I actually love Mix Rack and use it all the time in my mixes.

[Scarlet Pumpernickel]

What advice would you give someone who already has the Arouser but almost never uses it?

[Funkybot's Evil Twin]

What advice would you give someone who already has the Arouser but almost never uses it?

Depends...why don't you use Arousor? I think Arousor is excellent (particularly the new Opto modes), FG-Stress is very good too. I think FG-Stress and Arousor are very similar and cover a lot of the same ground. If you're not using Arousor, you may not use FG-Stress.

[Scarlet Pumpernickel]

Depends...why don't you use Arousor? I think Arousor is excellent (particularly the new Opto modes), FG-Stress is very good too. I think FG-Stress and Arousor are very similar and cover a lot of the same ground. If you're not using Arousor, you may not use FG-Stress.

To keep it short, it always sounded kinda "vanilla" to me - uninspiring, so it's rarely survived to the end of a project. I mostly tried Arousor with fast attack and almost never liked the result. Also I find its approach to parallel processing to be extremely convoluted and practically inefficient.
The opto-mode was a bit late to the party for me; I have enough "opto" plug-ins now that I would reach for before Arousor.

I demoed FG-Stress when it was released and, if nothing else, it sounded more "characterful" than Arousor to me at the time.

[Funkybot's Evil Twin]

Depends...why don't you use Arousor? I think Arousor is excellent (particularly the new Opto modes), FG-Stress is very good too. I think FG-Stress and Arousor are very similar and cover a lot of the same ground. If you're not using Arousor, you may not use FG-Stress.

To keep it short, it always sounded kinda "vanilla" to me - uninspiring, so it's rarely survived to the end of a project. I mostly tried Arousor with fast attack and almost never liked the result. Also I find its approach to parallel processing to be extremely convoluted and practically inefficient.
The opto-mode was a bit late to the party for me; I have enough "opto" plug-ins now that I would reach for before Arousor.

I demoed FG-Stress when it was released and, if nothing else, it sounded more "characterful" than Arousor to me at the time.

IMO, and I own FG-Stress, Arousor, and the UAD version...all are pretty damn close. I can get FG-Stress and Arousor dialed in so close I wouldn't reliably be able to tell them apart. Throw 'em in Plugin Doctor...you can dial them in very closely very easily. The key to remember that 6:1 on a Distressor (UAD or FG-Stress) is 8:1 on Arousor. This is true of the other ratios as well - Arousor is always off by one against a hardware Distressor or emulations. This impacts the knee shape too so it's more than just ratio. Also, for dialing them in tight, you can either tweak the second harmonic on Arousor's expert panel or add Dist 2 on the FG-Stress and they're basically right there.

The workflow is better on FG-Stress (not counting the Rack) and/or the UAD versions though. But Arousor offers far more control. But from a sound perspective, they're all on par IMO. Very good.

BTW, I really like the Arousor Opto modes despite having lots of others. Give them a shot, they have a uniqueness to their sound I really like. I was trying them out on acoustic guitar recently and shot them out against other optos and I preferred the Arousot Opto B to anything I owned on that particular test.

[Scarlet Pumpernickel]

Thank you Funkybot's Evil Twin, that is very helpful description; it saves me $49 and leaves hope of truly discovering Arousor one day.

[illegal4Hunna]

Well personally I think FG-Stress and Arousor are both flaming ass. Arousor is pretty much just a standard digicomp with some bells and whistles and FG-Stress has harsh hashy high-end like most of Slate's VMR stuff.

If you're after a Distressor for cheap I'd say get Disto-S by Sknote. Great plugin, very versatile, and imo it shits on FG-Stress and Arousor.

[4damind]

I've seen the offer too and it's rather rare that Slate makes such offers (I would even say this is the first time?).

Well, I'm not so sure about the FG-Stress. Like a LA2A and a 1176 but just different? It definitely sounds less soft than an LA2A and you can also compress quite high. You can of course also take a good LA2A or 1176 emulation and they also sound excellent. The offer is certainly great but whether you really need the FG-Stress is more difficult to answer.

Btw. the Arousor is not sold by Empirical Labs as a Distressor emulation to my knowledge. Maybe this is more a modern interpretation of the ideas behind the Distressor? As far as the original Distressor is concerned, FG-Stress is perhaps even closer to the original than the Arousor. There is also the UAD Distressor which is "approved" by Empirical Labs, so this seems to be one of the strongest competitors.

[jens]

The key to remember that 6:1 on a Distressor (UAD or FG-Stress) is 8:1 on Arousor. This is true of the other ratios as well - Arousor is always off by one against a hardware Distressor or emulations. This impacts the knee shape too so it's more than just ratio. .

Are you sure? That seems completely bizarre and a like a huge coding errror to me and how did they not get that during coding and testing? Also how does that actually work? Arousor adds two additional modes (1.5:1 and 8:1) so is 1:6 actually an additional one and 1:1 too, as 1.5:1 equals 1:1 in the others? And what about Nuke then, is it completely missing in Arousor?