MusicRadar

The meters give genuinely useful info, and look pretty cool too.

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• Review

Vengeance-Sound made their name with their acclaimed sound libraries, but now they also make plug-ins. So far we've seen Multiband Sidechain for dual-band sidechain pumping effects and Metrum, a kick drum synthesiser.

Their latest effort, Multiband Compressor, is the first in their Mastering Suite range, and it is much less esoteric than its predecessors - at least, at first glance. But why go multiband?

Multiband compressors and limiters are designed to apply frequency-specific dynamics processing, making them suitable for applying to complete tracks, since they typically have complex activity taking place across the entire frequency range.

"This plug-in looks awesome in action, and the meters give genuinely useful visual feedback."

Multiband dynamics can be used as a corrective measure, to make a quiet, weak bottom end louder and more consistent, for example. Alternatively, they can be used to enhance a great mix by applying targeted compression or limiting, enabling you to pull specific frequencies of the track together without the level and balance being affected by other bands.

Multiband Compressor (MBC) offers up to four bands of precise dynamic control. On the surface, it's a pretty standard affair, with compression or limiting for each band and a master limiter on the output.

The overall band ranges are set in the display window, as is the gain. It's all very straightforward. Some plug-ins offer more than four bands, but we think four is ample for most people's purposes.

All that glitters is gold

Take a closer look and you'll uncover a huge range of options. You can set the slope of the filters that divide the bands, from a very loose 6dB (resulting in lots of crossover from one to another) to a ruthlessly surgical 96dB. This setting will depend on the style of music you're mastering and the adjustments you're making.

Then there are the dazzling meters and displays. It's fair to say that this plug-in looks awesome in action. The meters give genuinely useful visual feedback on the levels of signals going into and out of sections as well as the amount of attenuation going on.

It's as comprehensive a visualisation system as we've ever seen and it makes MBC fun and exciting to use. Our only gripe is that the compression gain reduction meters are quite short but go right down to -48dB, so when applying 'sensible' amounts of compression (eg, a few dB), the meters are barely tickled.

There's a huge range of presets, ranging from fun and creative to the (slightly useless) overall mastering templates; usefully, there are individual band presets too, for both compressor/limiter and DPC.

As easy as DPC

Dynamic Pattern Compression is essentially a tempo sync'd multipoint amplitude envelope for each and every band. The results can range from something as simple as a subtly highlighted kick to utterly outrageous frequency-dependent pumping and bouncing.