Looking for a general purpose workhorse outboard compressor, s/h and cheap. The 3 I'm considering are the alesis 3630, behringer composer pro, and dbx 266xl or an older dbx, assuming it has the same flexibility. I'm sure there are people who have owned one or all of these at some point, so lets hear some opinions/recommendations! I've never owned a h/w compressor before so I will be using this for everything - limiting, gating, compression on all sorts of material, special effects, vocal compression, side chaining, ducking, de-essing, you name it. I hope to use this to learn and get a firm grasp on just what can be accomplished with a compressor.

http://www.fmraudio.com/ - RNC (really nice compressor) is the one you want. much much better than the others you named, but equaly cheap.

to be honest, i dont think you'll learn much from those three either... they dont sound really nice, plus its hard to get any kind of "creative" compression fx from them (musical pumping etc). if you really must have an all-in-one comp with bells and whistles go at least for a dbx166 which sounds a bit better (IMO).

Out of those, I'd vote for the 166, too, but none of them are extremely flexible. Personally, I'd rather cut with conservative levels at 24-bit and use a high quality software compressor than taint any signal with one of those boxes (tho the 166 is not bad). Personally, I wouldn't plunk down money on hardware compression at all unless I had enough for a Distressor. I know... not much help... but it is an opinion...

psy

ugh... distressor! cmon, focustrite silver stuff (or old green) or joemeek arent bad either, yet are a fraction of the price of the distressor.

In the price range, I'll second the RNC as well. Once you're into the prie range of a Distressor, you've actually got quite a few options, but that's not the question. The RNC will be a much better workhorse. I've seen a mod for a 3630 that makes it decent, but you need to be have some soldering skills to replace some IC sockets on teh boards for that. If you can handle it then you might want to get both an RNC and the 3630, just as a learning experience. The RNC would be the better workhorse, though.

Ape

Alright, thanks for the input. How does the DBX 166A compare to the original 166? It sells for a little cheaper.