I was about to mention that but you beat me to it. I think he just wants some hardware.
OP, what are you trying to compress? If you are just bringing some sounds out of the box, through the compressor and then back in, you are better off with a software compressor.
If you a recording a bass, a vocalist or some live drums, then that is another story and a hardware compressor could benefit you there.
I record live guitar and vocals, drum samples, and occasionally bass guitar as a second layer to my synth bass. I like to eat and have electricity though. Iāll just try running some stuff through a few guitar pedals I have laying around and go from there.
I second the notion that the RNC isnāt really worth it. Youāll get more character out of something like the slate plugins for similar price. You may check these out for compression as well as track āwarmingā/analog character:
http://www.sknote.it/RawPro.htm
Not too much more expensive, but much higher quality and sonic character. Mic pre and compressor combo, but running tracks thru preamps are a great way to livin them up.
whoa, those things seem pretty rad. You got any first hand experience with them?
p.s we still need to get that studio session going man, sorry I dropped the ball so hard on that. Life has been hectic
Havenāt used them myself, but people whose ears I trust have a lot of respect for the company and their other products. I bet 1176 FET one rocks.
@cyclopian: no worries dude, Iāve been super busy and out of town a lot too. Iām down to hang out anytime though! I bet we could make a sick track jamming in my studio 
His name reads like a Twisted Individual EP but his posts are proletariat in the sheets.
More expensive, but Warm Audio is worth a look tooā¦seriously considering their Tone Beast pre-amp/channel strip for recording my synths.
Look up the line of effects released by Ham Audio.
Thatās what she said?
I ended up using a lot of FabFilter Saturn (I learned my way around it better, still a n00b at everything)
Itās very nice. I even got I to waves plugins. Software emulation has a lot more to offer than I originally suspected. You can hear what Iāve been working on here
The idea of running stems through a tape deck really tickled my fancy, and you can hear a few examples of where I did that on the first and last tracks on the album.
Looking to score a big muff in the near future. 
I had been finding that digital EQ and compression werenāt actually improving my sound if I listened objectively at equal apparent volume, so I got out some analogue I had stashed away probably out of laziness or some idiocy and found that in the analog domain I could actually improve the sound.
Iām using
an EQ131 that doesnāt have a brand name on it that I got from some site in Australia;
a Boss RCL-10 compressor. It can also expand and gate, but I havenāt used it for those purposes;
a Behringer desk with Xenyx preamps that I sometimes overdrive for saturation.
Iām less familiar with analogue signal processing, but my belief is that the reason digital EQ harms the audio is because of the unintended phase manipulation of the partials by the digital signal processing algorithms used. Why digital compression doesnāt seem to help is harder to determine.
Oi you fucking spastic you didnāt EVEN hyphenate pre-amp!
But not to be dick like you, I can tell you you are correct in that assumption.
The phasing often means the wanted bit of manipulation cant catch up with the way the daw loops. I assume they cant program it in a way that would re-trigger it appropriately - so it goes out of sync.
What you can do against this, is to resample the EQs effect/ render it on to a single sound and make sure it āsyncsā and then loop those bits.
Tbh I personally just rarely use EQ. Filtering can handle most EQ tasks for me. Like a good notch filter is never a surgical EQ cut and canāt exactly substitute it, but you can poke holes ina sound without the fear of phase issues.
Better for full frequency content like a bass than drums tho - but you get a feel for it down the line. Itās ok for a drum buss for example.
Likeā¦how much EQing is anyone even doingā¦maybe my mixes are shitā¦but if you are composing āwith EQ in mindā all you should need is shelving and maybe a notch here and thereā¦
the sweet lilā baby jesus invented octaves for a reasonā¦so shit aināt all gotta be in the same oneā¦
you get phase shifts with analog too. just think about the delay caused by splitting part of the signal, processing it, and then summing it back together. no way to get around it except lookahead
in the digital domain most filters/eqs are implemented the same way (infinite impulse response filters). thereās also finite impulse response filters, which is what is used for linear phase EQs but you can get other issues like preringing
I process single hits. The phasing is not in the sequencer, but the filter.
Here is a chart showing the phase shift caused by a digital lowpass filter. The top two have a linear frequency scale on the x-axis, with the amplitude first and the phase second. The bottom to have a logarithmic scale at the x-axis. I couldnāt find one for a bell.
I process the sounds as one-drops early on, to then be used in separate registers. I find I can get a better sound by processing the sounds, including EQ, in solo. Nobody said they were EQing sounds to fit in the same register.
Yes, analogue filters also shift the phase. A difference may be between graphical and parametric EQ, because I find digital high- and low-pass filters usable.
That still doesnāt explain the difference between digital and analogue compression, though.
what iāve heard is that it comes down to sampling rates. in order to avoid aliasing, you really need twice the sample rate of your highest harmonic. anything that exceeds half your total sampling rate gets reflected back about the nyquist frequency (half your sampling rate) as aliasing. so 44.1 khz is okay for audio signals, but when it comes to the nuanced math behind detection and gain reduction, in reality you need somewhat more
not really what i was suggestingā¦more so that I try to compose in such a way not much eq is needed
Iām saying I do to? When did anybody even say they use a lot of EQ?
