Hardware Distressor/Limiter/Compressor

[Becharax]

Awesome reply dude !! I really appreciate the time you took to answer

[Bookerv12]

If it helps.....
I have a few Distressors (as well as a bunch of other outboard units).
I have found, through years of use, the Distressor can be a pretty powerful piece of gear. It does some really magical things.
What I can't get it/them to do, as Mr. Waltz mentioned above, is get it to do anything nice on a 2 bus. There are better tools and plugins for that.

What they do do well, is mild to crazy compression on the way in on individual tracks, or, as an insert on a track.
I find you can really crank the compression up in a nice way.....which is sometimes difficult with a lot of the plugins.
(This week, we were pulling our hair out compressing a male vocal with every available tool. As a laugh, we disabled all of the plugs and inserted a Distressor on the "opto" setting. Bam! There it was. No EQ or anything)

For what it's worth, I do a lot of compressed tracks on the way in.
It takes a while to learn, but that's my workflow.

Good luck