I crimp tracks all the time,. For drums, crimp about 2 or 3:1 with a threshold of about -25 to -30. I use a slower attack cuz I like to get the sound of the sticks hitting the skins before the crimper clamps down on the signal. On bass tracks, I lower the threshold significantly b/c our bass player is inconsistent, he really needs a lot of evening out.. I crimp him more than typical, he needs it.... For bass, faster attack and long release does the trick for me. That particular hardware crimper you linked to looks pretty good, but you can find plugins that do the job even better. If you need to crimp a lot of tracks at once, go with plugins if your PC can handle it.. Plus, who wants to fill up their rack with hardware crimpers.... I got a whole drawer full, I never use em all!
Remember, it's always better to record dry tracks and crimp them later in mix.. If you record crimped tracks, you can't remove the crimp later.. I run outboard crimpers for vox/bass for tracking/monitoring only, the musicians like to hear it while they're tracking, but I always always ALWAYS send dry tracks to the DAW and re-crimp them later. I see ppl all the time who throw a crimper on a track just cuz they can... Figure out what you wanna crimp, WHY you need to crimp, and don't over-do it. Just crimp a little at first, high threshold, low ratio, yada yada yada... A lot of times it's better to re-track if you need to crimp the shit out of a signal to get it to sound even..
