any users of sony dynamic plugin?

[Greene]

thinking about this purchased. opinions welcome. alternatives?

[dtmprod]

i love it, have compared with others, but the Sony ususally wins. Would strongly recommend it.

[frenchman]

I use it quite a lot

plus : (amongst a long list...)
- Expander is excellent, notably used in conjunction with the sidechain eq
- The warmth function is really good (used with moderation of course). In my view will do most of what a moderatly set inflator does
- Very clean and well behaved compression on mixed material, even classical. No sound "smear" when big gain changes occur like on some very nice looking GUI but pretty bad plugins I know of...

- Good limiter : again it will behave very well on complex material.
- brilliant sidechain eq on the full versions

minus:
- A little short on excitment at times, it can go far but it take some tweaking : if you want to compress your way to the dark side of the force by just turning the knob to eleven, some other more... drastic compressors (like the excellent Smack, and Compressor bank notably) might be more fun and even work better

This said I never have a session without a few instances of Sony Dynamics. When I was using hardware in the not so good old days I would have dreamed of such a versatile yet high quality tool

Try it, you will probably like it.
A funny thing is that I initially thought it would outrank McDSP Compressor Bank but somehow it is not the case. I keep prefering CB1 for certain things like vocals !

[Steve MacMillan]

Its very nice.

Sony Dynamics is the best gate by far, it has a 15 sample ish lookahead on the gate trigger and so it usually doesn't cut off transients. My main complaint is that the external side chain input feeds all the different triggers at the same time. It would be far better if you could key the gate externally but have the compressor react to the normal signal.

STeve

[frenchman]

It would be far better if you could key the gate externally but have the compressor react to the normal signal.

Very true

As to the best gate/expander I have recently found the Waves renaissance channel to be marginally beter than the Sony on very severe problems like excessive HiHat/cymbal bleed on snare drum

[thin ice]

Sony Dynamics looked a bit complex and not so immediate as some plugins at first. However, if you put a bit of time in it is very rewarding. You can get a lot of gain reduction without too many side effects if you want.