Teacher
New member
thanks for ur help
Is there a better compressor for a Lower price then the Alesis 3630?
Blue Bear Sound
New member
I don't know about lower price, but you'd have to spend a good $1500 more or so before you start getting a better compressor than the RNC from FMR Audio... ( http://www.fmraudio.com )
Bruce
Bruce
sonusman
Banned
Anyway....
Check out the Behringer Composer Pro. Has ALL the same features as the 3630, sound WAY better on almost everything, and also has a very good Peak Limiter. Only about $190.
For the same money, you can get the RNC, but be advised that it is a stereo comressor only, meaning that it will not do two mono channels, so if you think you might need dual mono, it won't do it. Also, it runs unbalanced, which tends to create some problems with hook up to balanced gear. Also, it has NO true Peak Limiter, and trust me, you will find a lot of uses for Peak Limiting in a tracking environment.
I think you will have a very hard time finding another sub $200 compressor/Peak Limiter that sounds anywhere as good as the Composer Pro. The original Composers sold for over $700 new when they first came out. Their sound is comparable to units in that price range (yes, I have tried many....), so you can be assured that you are getting a good sounding compression design here that will be capatible in home studio, or professional studio environment.
I will say though that Behringer has had a lot of problems lately with shipping units that end up having problems in a short amount of time. Your best bet if you buy one is to turn it on and leave it on for about 3 or 4 days when you get it to "burn it in" and see if it starts to exibit problems. If so, don't mess around and demand a new replacement unit. If you get one that works, it should work for a long time for you. At the two clubs I work at, we have several of these units that we use for channel insertion, as well as "end line" limiting over the post house eq going to the crossover to keep errant transient peaks from killing the speakers. These units have yet to fail in their job of doing this! It has saved the PA system owner a whole lot of money of reconing speakers from amps clipping at their input! As channel inserts, not ONE of the engineers, both house, and traveling engineers has had one complaint about using these boxes on critical channels like voice, horns, keyboards, etc.....They do very well at controlling volume without too much color added from heavy compression.
I was looking over the RNC's "Super Nice" setting, and this would appear to be something to the effect of the old dbx "over-easy" deal they did for a long time. I never found it to be what I was after unless I was doing voice over work where a totally non-dynamic voice was needed.
Now that you know what the best "budget" compressor for the money is
)), let's address a couple things about compressors in general, and what you can expect from using on either while tracking or while mixing.
I am assuming from the fact that you are inquiring about the 3630 that you have possibly little experience with compressors, lest you would have used other units that work better.... Not a slam here, but I like to get all the cards in a row before discussing processing, and it's need or lack thereof in recording. If you have little experience with compressors, you MIGHT be thinking that they are going to offer a HUGE advantage to making your tracks sound better. By that I mean that you may expect this box to do things that should rightfully be done another way! So, I will send you a link here with a really good article about comression that has audio examples, so that you can hear how compression actually is far more subtle in helping, if the tracks sound good to start with. Here it is:
http://www.geocities.com/shailat2000 Click on the Compression link for his article and make sure you download the audio examples as hearing is believing.
Some of my thoughts.
Most cheap compressors are not going to effectively offer more than about 3 or 4 dB of gain reduction on any low end heavy recording without distorting the sound, sometimes in very nasty ways. If you are for say recording a man voice who is a tenor, and his dynamics are all over the place, say from -20 to 0dB while recording, a compressor is going to have to do a whole lot of compression to even out that vocal part. But, do remember that SOME dynamics in music are desirable, and trying to keep a highly dynamic instrument at a consistant steady volume is not only almost impossible to do (especially to you ears....read up on the Fletcher/Munson Relative Loudness curves for more details on that) but would require so much compression that the sound would be horrible! So, don't expect that compression is going to be your best solution for overly dynamic performances that are out of context dynamically with the rest of the instrumentation. The fix for this is to possibly alter mic positions, but more than likely, the best solution is to have the performer NOT perform quite so dynamically. If the performance DEMANDS that there are very softly sung vocals and loudly sung vocals with in a background context that is steady in dynamics, you should consider track the soft parts seperate from the loud parts. This will help you avoid having to use much comression at all.
Next. Compressors will effect the tonal color, sometimes in very obvious ways, to what it is applied to if the settings are not carefully set! The reason why this is important is that you may need to consider WHERE you are compressing, either Pre or Post equalization. The compressor will sound much different between pre and post equalization, and you have to experiment a lot to see which way works best for you.
Compressing before equalizing means that you have more control of the overall eq of the track, but, it also means that you may have far more gain reduction being applied. The reason is that often, a very loud part on an intrument may be from unbalanced frequencies. So, you have a blasting frequency causing the compressor to start compressing. This may be what you are after, and if so, cool.
Compressing after equalization means you will have far less gain reduction but will have less control on the overall eq of the track. Sometimes, this is desirable, to not have to compress as much. Say like on a bass guitar, where maybe a few notes on the lowest string really sound a lot louder. If you compressed before eq, the compressor would be triggered by those louder tones. What MAY be a better approach is to have the tones turned down before the compressor so that the compressor can work a lot less at averaging the dynamics. This approach can really make a track sound far more natural.
Either way you do it depends on what kind of results you seek. I point this issue out mainly because most people JUST do it one way or another, and don't get all they could out of compression as you would with trying both ways.
There is a whole slew of approaches that one can take to compression, but would be impossible to cover hear because you basically use your ears first, then your knowledge and experience to make adjustments to get what you want. Don't expect a compressor to just all of a sudden make everything sound better in a drastic way! It really won't unless you apply it very carefully. I have worked on many mixes where I only used a slight amount of compression on the vocals and bass guitar and got very good results. I have also had mixes where I have used 10 channels of compression with most of them doing heavy compression and got good results too. Whether to use a lot or very little, OR SOMEWHERE IN BETWEEN you will learn over time. I can seriously say that you will not get the most out of compression until you can clearly hear what each control on a compressor is doing to your sound. It is not always that obvious, and almost as a rule, if you are inexperienced in using compression, you will not hear the stuff that ill applied compression does to the tracks it is applied to. After time, you will start to hear the effects and can start making better adjustments to get the results you seek.
Anyway, just some info and some food for thought here.
Ed
Check out the Behringer Composer Pro. Has ALL the same features as the 3630, sound WAY better on almost everything, and also has a very good Peak Limiter. Only about $190.
For the same money, you can get the RNC, but be advised that it is a stereo comressor only, meaning that it will not do two mono channels, so if you think you might need dual mono, it won't do it. Also, it runs unbalanced, which tends to create some problems with hook up to balanced gear. Also, it has NO true Peak Limiter, and trust me, you will find a lot of uses for Peak Limiting in a tracking environment.
I think you will have a very hard time finding another sub $200 compressor/Peak Limiter that sounds anywhere as good as the Composer Pro. The original Composers sold for over $700 new when they first came out. Their sound is comparable to units in that price range (yes, I have tried many....), so you can be assured that you are getting a good sounding compression design here that will be capatible in home studio, or professional studio environment.
I will say though that Behringer has had a lot of problems lately with shipping units that end up having problems in a short amount of time. Your best bet if you buy one is to turn it on and leave it on for about 3 or 4 days when you get it to "burn it in" and see if it starts to exibit problems. If so, don't mess around and demand a new replacement unit. If you get one that works, it should work for a long time for you. At the two clubs I work at, we have several of these units that we use for channel insertion, as well as "end line" limiting over the post house eq going to the crossover to keep errant transient peaks from killing the speakers. These units have yet to fail in their job of doing this! It has saved the PA system owner a whole lot of money of reconing speakers from amps clipping at their input! As channel inserts, not ONE of the engineers, both house, and traveling engineers has had one complaint about using these boxes on critical channels like voice, horns, keyboards, etc.....They do very well at controlling volume without too much color added from heavy compression.
I was looking over the RNC's "Super Nice" setting, and this would appear to be something to the effect of the old dbx "over-easy" deal they did for a long time. I never found it to be what I was after unless I was doing voice over work where a totally non-dynamic voice was needed.
Now that you know what the best "budget" compressor for the money is
)), let's address a couple things about compressors in general, and what you can expect from using on either while tracking or while mixing.I am assuming from the fact that you are inquiring about the 3630 that you have possibly little experience with compressors, lest you would have used other units that work better....
Not a slam here, but I like to get all the cards in a row before discussing processing, and it's need or lack thereof in recording. If you have little experience with compressors, you MIGHT be thinking that they are going to offer a HUGE advantage to making your tracks sound better. By that I mean that you may expect this box to do things that should rightfully be done another way! So, I will send you a link here with a really good article about comression that has audio examples, so that you can hear how compression actually is far more subtle in helping, if the tracks sound good to start with. Here it is:http://www.geocities.com/shailat2000 Click on the Compression link for his article and make sure you download the audio examples as hearing is believing.
Some of my thoughts.
Most cheap compressors are not going to effectively offer more than about 3 or 4 dB of gain reduction on any low end heavy recording without distorting the sound, sometimes in very nasty ways. If you are for say recording a man voice who is a tenor, and his dynamics are all over the place, say from -20 to 0dB while recording, a compressor is going to have to do a whole lot of compression to even out that vocal part. But, do remember that SOME dynamics in music are desirable, and trying to keep a highly dynamic instrument at a consistant steady volume is not only almost impossible to do (especially to you ears....read up on the Fletcher/Munson Relative Loudness curves for more details on that) but would require so much compression that the sound would be horrible! So, don't expect that compression is going to be your best solution for overly dynamic performances that are out of context dynamically with the rest of the instrumentation. The fix for this is to possibly alter mic positions, but more than likely, the best solution is to have the performer NOT perform quite so dynamically. If the performance DEMANDS that there are very softly sung vocals and loudly sung vocals with in a background context that is steady in dynamics, you should consider track the soft parts seperate from the loud parts. This will help you avoid having to use much comression at all.
Next. Compressors will effect the tonal color, sometimes in very obvious ways, to what it is applied to if the settings are not carefully set! The reason why this is important is that you may need to consider WHERE you are compressing, either Pre or Post equalization. The compressor will sound much different between pre and post equalization, and you have to experiment a lot to see which way works best for you.
Compressing before equalizing means that you have more control of the overall eq of the track, but, it also means that you may have far more gain reduction being applied. The reason is that often, a very loud part on an intrument may be from unbalanced frequencies. So, you have a blasting frequency causing the compressor to start compressing. This may be what you are after, and if so, cool.
Compressing after equalization means you will have far less gain reduction but will have less control on the overall eq of the track. Sometimes, this is desirable, to not have to compress as much. Say like on a bass guitar, where maybe a few notes on the lowest string really sound a lot louder. If you compressed before eq, the compressor would be triggered by those louder tones. What MAY be a better approach is to have the tones turned down before the compressor so that the compressor can work a lot less at averaging the dynamics. This approach can really make a track sound far more natural.
Either way you do it depends on what kind of results you seek. I point this issue out mainly because most people JUST do it one way or another, and don't get all they could out of compression as you would with trying both ways.
There is a whole slew of approaches that one can take to compression, but would be impossible to cover hear because you basically use your ears first, then your knowledge and experience to make adjustments to get what you want. Don't expect a compressor to just all of a sudden make everything sound better in a drastic way! It really won't unless you apply it very carefully. I have worked on many mixes where I only used a slight amount of compression on the vocals and bass guitar and got very good results. I have also had mixes where I have used 10 channels of compression with most of them doing heavy compression and got good results too. Whether to use a lot or very little, OR SOMEWHERE IN BETWEEN you will learn over time. I can seriously say that you will not get the most out of compression until you can clearly hear what each control on a compressor is doing to your sound. It is not always that obvious, and almost as a rule, if you are inexperienced in using compression, you will not hear the stuff that ill applied compression does to the tracks it is applied to. After time, you will start to hear the effects and can start making better adjustments to get the results you seek.
Anyway, just some info and some food for thought here.
Ed
Teacher
New member
i'm not experienced with compression the only compressor i used was sonic foundry dx plugin.....and sonusman thanks for all that info...could grasp it all but thanks
Blue Bear Sound
New member
sonusman said:Anyway....
...
Ed
Heh-heh
Bruce
MISTERQCUE
Not Just Anutha Brutha
...and sonusman,may I kindly add.....
....the MultiCom and AutoCom,4-channel and 2-channel comps respectively that are extremely useful in most comping,limiting and gating applications,especially for the price! The RNC; 1of the smoothest,most transparent comps I've ever used, RULES!! (again,thx Bruce).I'm no TRUE expert on compressors,but d@mn,
gotta' give Behringer props for thier comps.
Also,in the field of compression applications,much praise to sonusman and Shailat for their invaluable lessons via their link,
plenty of experimentation and listening and learning!
As far as the 3630 IMHO,it will give you some weird efx using bass
that might be serviceable,but too much unwanted and noticeable
"aftertaste" tones are often produced.
Go with the RNC, which now can be had for 'bout US$160-175~
....the MultiCom and AutoCom,4-channel and 2-channel comps respectively that are extremely useful in most comping,limiting and gating applications,especially for the price! The RNC; 1of the smoothest,most transparent comps I've ever used, RULES!! (again,thx Bruce).I'm no TRUE expert on compressors,but d@mn,
gotta' give Behringer props for thier comps.
Also,in the field of compression applications,much praise to sonusman and Shailat for their invaluable lessons via their link,
plenty of experimentation and listening and learning!
As far as the 3630 IMHO,it will give you some weird efx using bass
that might be serviceable,but too much unwanted and noticeable
"aftertaste" tones are often produced.
Go with the RNC, which now can be had for 'bout US$160-175~
frederic
New member
Re: ...and sonusman,may I kindly add.....
You mean you don't like compresser huffing on your bass lines?
::grin::
Frederic
You mean you don't like compresser huffing on your bass lines?
::grin::
Frederic
Scooter B
New member
Alesis 3630
For my money no compressor at all is better than the 3630 at any low price. The noise gate is sometimes usefull.
If you really want one I will sell you two of them for $200 so I can buy one RNC.
Any 3630 fans out there?
For my money no compressor at all is better than the 3630 at any low price. The noise gate is sometimes usefull.
If you really want one I will sell you two of them for $200 so I can buy one RNC.
Any 3630 fans out there?