Hey there,
Software vs hardware eh? Oh dear oh dear, you've opened a can of worms there.
I'm sure a lot of people will not agree with me at all but... by now most will know I'm an opinionated so-and-so anyway.
I used to have a whole collection of compressors, mainly vintage ones like LA2A's, Telefunken, Universal, as well as a bunch of DBX's etc. Got rid of them all, and bought one stereo compressor which, I think, is so far in a class of its own it makes everything else obsolete.
I will use that one for tracking some things - and please note that when I track, I always go DIRECT to tape or disk, never through a console - and I use it for mastering, if I need it.
For anything else I use software compressors. If anyone says they are not as good as hardware ones, well, lets put it like this, a while ago I saw someone mixing on a pro tools system, with a wall of good'ol compressors etc. next to him. We started talking and asked me what I used, so I told him mainly the Waves Renaissance DSP plug-in, and also the Mc.DSP Compressor Bank plug in. After he told me he had listened to them all and thought they sounded like crap, I asked him if he knew the sample delay time of each piece of tube gear he was using, and had made appropriate adjustments to all the tracks accordingly. He looked at me in total amazement.
The moral of this story was; Don't judge what some things sound like, if you cannot even hear that your tracks' timing is all over the place.
As you can imagine, if you insert an analogue compressor in a digital chain, you have to go through a DA conversion, an AD conversion, and through tubes, which slows things down a bit. By the time your signal is back with his other "track brothers and sister" your signal is at best 7 samples behind its siblings. In order to keep the track tight, you will have to move everything else back in time by 7 samples. Now this timing happens to change depending on settings...........
Get my drift?
The "old" plug-in compressors were not very good. Some of the new ones are not just good, they are brilliant. The McDSP for instance has a set of controls which allows you to emulate a bunch of good old compressors with scary precission. This includes
LA2A,
UREI 1176LN,
Neve 2254 and the ndbx 165. What else would you want? More advantages - at least 90% less noise than their hardware mates. You can use one plug-in on multiple channels etc. No match really.
Some of your other questions. You talk about tracking, and how a plug -in could do the same there as a "comes before the system" hardware box. Simple, it does the same, you insert it in your path prior to going to disk, exactly the same.
Is your input overloaded? Why? Adjust the input level! Problem solved?
One of the few things I will normally use a compressor on is a kick drum, but even then, it depends on the drummer. Someone like Mick Fleetwood plays quite uneven in volume, so its a compression must to "smooth it out", while a drummer like Jota Morelli is like a human machine, every hit, every kick will be the same in attack, volume and velocity - no need for compression.
I hope that has been a little help.
Oh Bruce! Here's a hankie for your monitor
