This one has some good reviews and sounds promising. Anybody bought or demoed this thing? It sounds like it does the job very well. Is it on par with FabFilter?

The channel strip that always works. Take any track, any bus or any mix - the Summit Audio Grand Channel always sounds right. The Grand Channel combines the warm and smooth tone sculpting EQF-100 passive equalizer with the rich sounding and dead-easy-to-use TLA-100A compressor. As a modern addition to the classic TLA-100A, the plug-in also includes Parallel Compression, Saturation Control and Low Cut Filtering on input or detector. These two pieces of classic Summit Audio gear are what professional sound engineers have used for more than two decades to make their mixes sound just right. When the EQF-100 and TLA-100A were designed, Summit Audio made sure to combine the finest of what vintage tube designs had to offer with a modern sense of how these units should stand the test of time. The result was remarkable, and today you can experience the Summit Audio grandeur in digital form, just reach for the Grand Channel!


http://www.gearslutz.com/board/new-product-alert/742816-softube-ships-summit-audio-grand-channel-eqf-100-a-4.html

You can get the Grand Channel at Audio Deluxe for $219

The product may be excellent, but no "channel strip" is going to do better than high-quality individual plugins. It's just slightly more convenient to drop a single plugin into the fx bin.

And I'm sure you're aware that despite Softube's advertising copy, there are no vacuum tubes in a DLL.

I have a love/hate relationship w/ channel strips. To me, the convenience of having everything you need in a single GUI fails to mimic the real advantage of mixing w/ consoles - that is, immediate access to all the parameters on all channels at once.

That's one of the things I dug so much about mixing in Harrison's Mixbus - no need to click on inserts and open individual GUIs to make adjustments and then move them out of the way - it's all right there on the actual console's channel strip. Ironically, for me at least, makes it easier to really use your ears instead of your eyes. Almost like creating a basic balance in the console view. It makes it faster to make adjustments between tracks.

That being said, in terms of sound, no doubt that this one should be nice...

The eq has really sweet highs end he TLA-100A is one of the top levelling comp plugins you'll find.
A great combo for vox, sax, drums buss, mix buss. Also great for strings/ orchestral use too.

You don't need to stick it on every channel or specifically as a channel strip, that's a feature. You can also use the eq or comp as separate instances with or without the strip design.