- Product: Material Comp
- Developer: VoosteQ
- Type: Flexible analog modeling compressor
- Version: 1.7.13
- Format: VST, VST3, AU, AAX
- Requirements: Windows 10 or later, macOS 10.13 or later
Material Comp from VoosteQ has an all 3D design and 1296 variations. It was developed over 3 years to reproduce the nuances of an analog circuit, with fully 64-bit processing, extremely low CPU load, and exceptional transparency. It has six analog-modeled compressors, six saturation models, eight analog flavors, and four original glues that bring together all sounds.
I have two very opposite opinions about knobs with easy names. Rather than that, just name it what it is. But from a creative point of view, if you’re making music and you just want to add punch to your music, it makes kind of sense. It’s a very hyperactive feature list.
It’s software, so it’s flat and you can only touch it with your mouse. They added some shadows around the knobs. -60 dB is more difficult to read than +2 dB, and they find the three-dimensional interface more important than those values. So what does that say about the code behind the plug-in?
I personally believe that oversampling always gives us a higher quality than not oversampling, because it gives room for the analog harmonics a plug-in is creating. If there’s no oversampling, there’s no room for that.
Switching the comp mode with auto gain on suddenly put me 5 dB in the red. When you compare modes, they have to all run at the same volume. Otherwise you’re just tricking your ears and the loudest one would come out as the best. I did like the 60’s FET the most. On retro tape you’re losing high frequencies, and that’s not what you expect from a professional tape machine. One of the flavors is called Cheep Console, and I wondered if that was a typo. With Glue Magic, it starts compressing, and you don’t really know what it’s actually doing. You don’t have a lot of control.
It all works, but it’s definitely not a keeper for me. There’s a 14-day trial if you want to give it a try yourself.