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me of a more full-featured SSL Buss Compressor—with a fast grabby aggressiveness to its compression but not its tone. Speaking of speed, that was what impressed me most about the VSC-2. This thing is fast, and yet still musical even when clamping down hard. It is also highly versatile—it can be nice and subtle on the 2-bus or gentle and lifting on acoustic guitar, or it can lock down a vocal or slam a drum mix and make it bloom, or nail a bass to the mix floor, and it can pump with the best of them. With a folder full of Opto and FET emulations, the SC-2 nicely fills a sonic void in my collection of plug-in compressors, and does so at little CPU cost; as with the Passeq, 16 stereo/32 mono instances only just tickled 50% CPU load in Cubase on my MacBook Pro. Bottom line, this is a well-rounded, sounds-good-on-anything compressor, but my favorite uses were on acoustic guitar, male lead vocal and especially the drum bus.

Conclusion
The BIG 4 Bundle contains some of the best-coded hardware emulations. While geared toward mastering and 2-bus work, these plug-ins can also easily find multiple other uses in your work, and we look forward to seeing what else the Plugin Alliance brings us.

What is the Plugin Alliance? The Plugin Alliance was founded and formed by Dirk Ulrich of Brainworx. In addition to their own line of plug-ins, Dirk and his team are also the developers behind plug-ins for Elysia, SPL, Vertigo Sound, and Mäag Audio. The Alliance’s website banner lists other partner firms as well: CharterOak, Chandler Limited, Neve and Millennia Media. In the past each company had its own website, store front and tech support. Now with the Alliance all of these products are developed, distributed, sold and supported all from one central website. One of the most significant changes brought about with the formation of the Alliance is that of copy protection. In the past, each of these products made use of the Pace iLok, a copy protection USB key or “dongle”. One only has to do a cursory search of most pro audio forums to find strong opinions about that dongle, both for and against. While the “against” arguments range from driver and system issues to physical issues of damage and loss, the biggest argument on behalf of the iLok is being able to take your plug-ins with you and use them on any computer anytime, anywhere. The Plugin Alliance has addressed both sides. The “against” arguments are now moot, as there is no more iLok requirement, and the “for” argument has been handled quite elegantly by giving users three separate machine authorizations. So if you have a studio computer, a home editing suite and a portable laptop as I do, you are now covered... and it gets better still. First, each machine can be unauthorized and a new machine authorized instantly at any time—even if a machine dies, is stolen or rendered unusable under any other circumstances! Second, to address the issue of taking a session and your project-specific plugins to a different studio, as of the latest update you can put your licenses and installers on almost any USB memory stick and turn it into a portable dongle of sorts. Currently there are an impressive 29 products available within the Alliance, including four freebies if you want to get your foot in the door and join the family. If you already own one or more of these plug-ins in iLok-licensed form, you can keep using them if you wish since the old installers are archived on the Plugin Alliance website. If you purchased your plug-ins after May 1, 2011, you can cross-grade to the new versions for free. If you purchased them prior to that date, the cross-grade is a mere $20 per plug-in, but maxes out at no more than $50 total if you own three or more. If you take a look at the FAQ on the Plug-In Alliance web site, you will quickly see that this is a company with the customer’s best interests in mind, and a very studio-friendly innovation in copy protection.—PV

http://www.kelaudio.com http://www.RealTraps.com

Recording - August 2012

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