MixControl Pro

To me MixControl Pro is mainly a compressor that can do several other things, too. The compressor in MCP sounds very good on anything I have thrown at it. When used very slightly (about one dB reduction) it has a nice glue. That works great on single tracks or on the master. Controlling unsteady performances is easy to accomplish with it and sounds good. Plus this guy can smash things and still have a polite grin on it's face. It's so much fun! And all this was only the clean compression mode (#1).
The dirty variant (#2) adds lotsa possibilities as it sounds quite differently. The wow thing here is: The saturation is inside the compressor. The more it compresses the more it saturates. So it's not like two plugins in a row. Very cool. The sat mode sounds very good to me, very (sigh!) vintage.

The eq is good, no question. But my main eq is GlissEQ so there's no competition here. The MCP eq is a modern clean eq. So it doesn't necessarily add things to my palette. But having it available for some tone shaping in front of the compressor is very handy.

The limiter: To me this is rather the third compressor mode than a radical loudness factory. Sounds good. A Smoothie.

The Gate: Nothing spectacular, works OK.

Stereo: Again clever choice of effective controls but not too many. Three bands which allows for some cool multi widening tricks without having to set it up otherwise. Nice.

Sat: Good sounding and different than my other colouring tools. Nice addition to the palette.

OK, let's walk through the rating sections of the review!

User interface: Well, yes and no. I'm very picky on interfaces. While it's generally on the pretty side a few things don't click with me. It has tooltips whith mouse over which is nice when learning all the not so obvious but clever features. It's OK overall.

Sound: Yes, definitely. The compressor is a big wow factor for me. See my rant above.

Features: It can do a lot. MCP has a clever mix between usability and versatility.

Documentation: Mostly complete. A few infos more wouldn't have hurt but I must admit that I'm rather on the geeky side of such things. So for all normal questions there's an answer. ;-)

Presets: Hm, I really don't care. I don't use presets for such FX often and I didn't check most of the presets. There are quite some but no overwhelming amount, so this isn't a lexicon of audio engineering. But I don't think it should be either.

Customer Support: Great! Very friendly and responsive people who know what they are talking about.

Value for the money: Again, if this would be the compressor section alone it would be worth that money. Compared to other top quality compressors this is really good value for the money. And yes, it's not "only" the compressor!

Stability: Stable. Simple as that. Never crashed on me.

Resume:
If forced to I could mix a whole album with MCP alone while being happy with it. That's how versatile it is and that's how good it sounds. A good working professional tool. And if it would be for the compressor alone it would be worth to own it!Read Review