Drawmer 1978

Uso questo compressore nel mio home studio, principalmente in mix. Generalmente ci mando il bus di batteria e fa molto bene il suo lavoro.
E' super versatile per molti versi, l'eq integrato è un decisamente un plus, ed anche la distorsione (a piccole dosi).
Mi aspettavo un suono più caratteristico invece ha una compressione abbastanza trasparente (di certo non è una coppia di 1176 per intenderci). E questo può essere sia un pro che un contro, in base a cosa si sta cercando!
PRO:
- costo relativamente contenuto
- molto molto versatile!
CONTRO:
niente da segnalare, ma non ho mai avuto grosse soddisfazioni utilizzandolo finora, mi è sempre un po' mancato "l'effetto wow", ma forse devo solo giocarci un po' di più e conoscerlo meglio.

If you are a beginner, it’s much more worth for you learning everything you can about compression and all it’s possible applications before you even buy a plug-in, imagine a real compressor. This thing is not a guitar pedal, don’t expect to turn a knob until you get the sound you like. It’s very versatile, which makes it hard to tune. But if you care a lot about having the highest audio quality possible (I mean without selling your livers) on a stereo recording setup and you are already experienced on compression, then you will absolutely love this. I use it as part of my stereo golden channel (I have a ProArt MPA tube stereo pre) and it just sounds awesome. I also use it as external gear to replace software compressors every time I can. It’s got a tone shaping circuit which is very useful to get the raw tracks as good as possible before even eqing them in the DAW. But my favourite thing about this has to be the saturation feature. I use it almost everywhere, it’s like your favourite secret ingredient. It just makes every sound much richer in harmonic content. I have had this for months now and I used it even as a mastering compressor and I am always amazed by the improvements it makes. If you are a studio nerd and you want to bring compression to a next level, you will absolutely love to have this in your gear instead of another guitar.

I bought my first 1978 about half year ago. Compressor section was too clean for my taste . So i bought an SSL and sold my Drawmer. First time i was happy with it but after a few weeks of hard work on studio every day i started to realise how much i underestimated my Drawmer. I opened some projects which i mixed/mastered by Drawmer and realised that i can't reach this sound with my SSL.
So i had to by it again.

I need to say, that compressor section is still too colorless for itself (on my taste), but with proper use of shaping tool it becomes sooooo much better. Character section allows it to be as much versatile as possible but in 97% of my cases it's only linear release curve (lin, button ON) and unlinked channels (wide button ON).

Saturation section is handy in 90% of cases and only on 5-15% of knob. I wish it would be more settings for this section but for this price you can only dream about it. This "saturation" is more a soft-clipper but sometimes it becomes an awful
distortion that you can't use for mastering (but you can for drum bus or whatever bus).

Pretty good compressor with fet coloring and saturation stage. I used it as main bus compressor for a few months and can say that this thing is extremely versatile, from hip-hop to acoustic ballads it sounds awesome. Tone shaping function is pretty good thing but to my ears it doesn't work like usual sidechain filter, sometimes it works great, sometimes it makes sound too colored and boomy (for the low freq) so be careful with the knobs and add the level slightly from the zero point. Overall if you want classic "HP SC filter sound" you need to think about external sc. The only one thing that disappointed me is that to my ears it's not the best compressor for the vocal, 1176 plug-in from uad did this job better.