Kamikaze
You have the Retro Colour from XLN too Sharke? How the the Vinyls emulations compare? I've been n the fence about the RC20 every time it's in a sale, and getting the Waves Vinyl would edge me further off the fence. But the RC20 looks more flexible, and I'm trying to streamline but purchases and not have lots of similar things.
Yeah I have the RC-20 and I love it. Very hard to stop yourself from putting it on every track because it's such a great way to add texture and interest to the sound. RC-20 does a hell of a lot more stuff than Abbey Road Vinyl. I'm not putting Vinyl down because it's a steal at $29 and really does add some niceness (try the DJ cartridge on kicks - fantastic) but there is so much more you can do with RC-20 to shape the sound. The "vinyl" part of RC-20 is limited to the surface noise element, it doesn't add warmth or anything like that. But it also has a whole bunch of other kinds of noise (4 different tape noises, tube noise, studio noise, vinyl noise and more) and the great thing is that you can either "duck" the noise when the audio signal is playing, or you can engage an envelope follower so that the noise kicks in with your signal. This last feature I use all the time for sound shaping. You can for instance ramp the tone of the vinyl crackle right up and set it to follow drum hits so that your drums have this lovely crackley texture on top (or try it with the tape hiss). If you automate this noise to increase over time it's a great technique for drum build-ups and that sort of thing.
The tape wow and flutter is also very good, and you can adjust it to taste and also make it stereo for a very nice stereoizing technique.
Also don't forget that RC-20 has some excellent saturation and distortion. In fact I find myself slapping it on tracks just for the distortion module, sometimes preferring it to Decapitator which I also have (without the huge CPU overhead that Decapitator introduces).
The reverb module is very nice and gritty, kind of cheap sounding but that's the whole point. I often set it to mono and dial a little in with some predelay just to add sustain to a part.
And then there's the Magnetic module which adds more tape goodness, like tape wear and dropouts. The flutter element of this module is very nice and you can get a very cool tremolo effect from it.
Honestly if it was a toss up between Abbey Road Vinyl and RC-20 I would choose RC-20 every time, there's just so much more you can do with it and it's well worth the money. But given that Abbey Road is currently $29 I would frankly bite the bullet and get it as well if you can because it does add a little certain something to the sound that RC-20 won't do.