I was wrong - Rain and the 1176 adventure.

Last winter, in a lengthy thread about my issues w/ IK's Black 76 vs other models, I exposed my "findings" - especially in what seemed to be related to the attack and release parameters.

W/ the recent price drop on IK's singles, the current 50% off on NI's models (and now, the Black Friday sale on Waves CLA), I figured I had to follow up, and point out the flaws in my previous conclusions.

As I'd mentioned, all my tests were comparing software w/ software, as I'd never had the opportunity to test the original unit.

Steven Slate had started a thread on Gearslutz comparing the hardware unit in his possession w/ IK's Black 76. The biggest conclusion was that the Black 76 was much lighter on gain reduction. To demonstrate, he'd posted unprocessed clips and clips of the same material processed w/ the hardware and the software. IK later released a patch which addressed that, in part.

So I went ahead and downloaded both the unprocessed clips and the hardware-processed ones, and tried to reproduce the sound of the hardware one as closely as I could, using the IK, NI and Waves models.

The closest I could come was actually w/ the Black 76 and NI's VC 76. There were slight differences, but, at that point, being a matter of personal taste, the Black 76 was actually my favorite. 

The gain still had to be pushed a bit harder, but once that was done, sonically, it was darn close to that particular hardware unit.

By comparison, Waves models pack in a lot more gain reduction. Which in turns means that, even under less extreme settings, you'll be able to pack in a lot more punch, but also that the attack and release settings are much more obvious and audible. If you push the release to it's max. value (which I believe should be around 1200 ms), you can pretty much kill the decay of the sound, because the gain reduction goes so deep.

By comparison, since the other models don't squeeze the signal as much, even w/ the release turned all the way up, you'll sometimes get results which are almost the opposite - the decay portion of a signal will actually be louder than it originally was, even if it's effectively being compressed. 

Seems pretty obvious now, I know. 

As such, as an aggressive compression with lots of punch and sound shaping possibilities, CLA would obviously be my choice. 

But in terms of sounding close to the original unit, as far as I can see, IK's Black 76 actually does a very good job. It was an uneducated assumption on my part to imply that it didn't work as it should.

So to all my forum buddies wondering which model to get - download the demos and give each of those guys a try, and see which works best for you. And if that previous thread had casted any doubt, well you can just disregard it. I was wrong.

Happy 1176-ing.