dubdisciple
I don’t really recall much fanfare about the cakewalk pro channel compressors other than ca2a and lesser extent concrete. More than anything the two bundled ones were seen as convenient but unspectacular.
Agreed. CA-2A is regarded as one of the best emulations of the LA-2A. Apparently, there's some good code in that little gray GUI! PC76 and PC4KS were convenient indeed, but rather mushy and hard to dial in, IMO.
Rbh
I use the Sonitus comp quite a bit probably 60% of track inserted comps. The probably another 25% are UAD based comps for buss or master channel work. I use fab filter here and there.
Did you use any basic metric when comparing them all ? meaning - 4:1 ratio and metering -4db gain reduction on all comps etc etc ? I understand you level matched them.
I basically first ensured that silence occurred when the opposite-phased track was mixed into the master. Even if a plugin inherently added or subtracted gain, I zeroed it out by ear until silence or near-silence occurred. Since my findings were essentially remarks on what I heard, I did level-match them with a peak-meter utility in Ableton Live as well as used Spectrum (and Voxengo Span) for confirmation of what was going on. The analyzers were used to confirm if any harmonics were being generated, albeit loosely and not under great scrutiny.
On a side note, the dbx 160 comp is going to a tough sell...er, buy...for me. Once again, I am my own worst enemy! Experimenting around, I put an instance of Alloy 2 on my kick drum track and used the multi-band transient shaper to bring up just the high-end smack of the kick. This replicated the dbx 160 attack pretty well, with even better (and more controllable) results. The bottom-end was better preserved using Alloy 2 vs. the dbx 160. The kick drum had better cut but retained the punch and thud. Something to try if you haven't dusted off Alloy 2 for awhile!