I might look into that FMR Audio RNC. Is it worth the money?]
If you need a straight forward, very clean single channel or stereo Compressor it's a good bang for buck compressor. If you are looking for a color piece or 2 channel or dual mono compressor it can't do those things so I guess I'm saying it's value depends on what you need from it
And what sort of job does it do?
It does a very good job of clean compression from medium soft to very soft knee in Really Nice mode
Will the compression quality of the FMR Audio RNC top the built in Logic compression facilities?
depends on how you use it. Logic's compressor is more tweakable and the metering is better. RNC will very likely allow you to get a lot more gain reduction before you start to hear nasty artifacts. however if you are shooting for gain reductions of less than say 6dB I think you would be hard pressed to listen to tracks compressed via Logic vs RNC and reliably be able to pick out which one was which
M-AUDIO DMP 3 - Thomann UK Cyberstore as my pre- amp
DMP will give you 67 dB of clean gain which is probably a little more than you get from the tascam. whether you prefer one over the other (or can tell any difference at all) will be subjective and unique to you
Just one experience & opinion from past experience with owning and using both RNC & DMP
Sometimes I just think that like in good studios they always have lots of effects boxes (compression, limiters, pre amps...)
Its feels like you've got more going on and that its better because its external and 'real'- you can see it physically happening.
what you mostly have in good studios for tracking and mixing is:
Very talented musicians playing well rehearsed material on good instruments. The recording space is acoustically very good. Mics are well chosen and well placed, gain staging of analog front end (regardless of gear used) is correctly set up. the mix engineer has lots of experience, a properly treated mix room and monitors that will accurately tell him what is going on as well as input from the producer/artist as to what the vision for the song is
Dropping various different bits of gear or plugins into the mix of the above will make tiny differences, some better, some worse, some just different.
Without all of the above dropping a DMP and an RNC into the picture won't make things sound better and more like a studio in my (sadly painful) experience, and with all of the above in place dropping those pieces into the picture will give you more options for your already studio sound
YMMV