PSP MasterComp

PSP (Professional Sound Projects) are the makers of many well known, high-end audio plugins. They have just released the MasterComp plugin, which is a stereo compressor that is currently available for PC in VST, DirectX and RTAS formats with Mac versions in development.

It is advertised as a double precision, double sampled signal processing technology. According to PSP this translates to a 64-bit floating point precision that can retain very transparent results even when working with very high sample rate audio. Well, I'll be the judge of the transparency...

One thing I have always liked about PSP products, at least the ones I have used, is their "old school" look and feel. They replicate the look of vintage products very well. From the needle VU meters to the style of knobs and toggles it just has a look that is entertaining, easy on the eyes for using for long periods of time and yet doesn't sacrifice performance for that cool "old school" look. It does, however, often take a small toll on usability as I will explain later. PSP is also one of the companies that seems committed to serving as many people as possible by making their products in many formats, which is something some companies are starting to move away from and starting to just do VST, for example.

Usability and Performance

MasterComp performs admirably to say the least; it really does help it retain a transparency in the mix, and does great compression without squashing the life out of the audio. They attribute this to the double precision, 64-bit floating point processing...now, I won't even pretend to be enough of a techno-geek to know exactly how that does it, but, I am enough of an audio-geek to know that it is very transparent, much more so than other compressors I have used, both hardware and software. Of course, all that said, if you do, for some reason, want to squash the life out of your audio it surely can do it.

The one thing that annoys me about MasterComp, and it stands true for many plugins, including others from PSP, is that I just can't stand interfaces with a "front panel" and a "back panel", especially when they have no obviously marked method of flipping back and forth. If you click on MasterComp's logo in the lower left corner it flips to the "back" which contains a few additional controls and a panel that looks like the metal plate from older devices that contains serial numbers and such info. On MasterComp it contains version numbers and the authorization name. Click on that panel and you return to the front. As much as I dislike this design scheme, when trying to duplicate the "old school" look, which I do like, I can understand why it often comes along, as it does help hold the integrity of the old, analog looking design style.

Other than that UI/usability issue, the MasterComp plug is great. Very clean, very granular control, hard and soft knee options, side chain filtering, channel linking, compression tilting capabilities, limiter switch and much more. The hard and soft knee options are very different, and both definately can have their place in your audio processing process, and the limiter is very solid, creating a very hard ceiling.

Personal Thoughts...

I have used a lot of compression plugins before, and while working with MasterComp I compared it to a couple others by switching back and forth between them. I can say that MasterComp is the cleanest, most transparent sounding compressor I have used, and the CPU usage stays at reasonable levels. At $249 USD it's a very expensive plugin, so it may well be out of range for many hobby musicians, but for that price, it is, in my mind, without a doubt the best software compressor on the market.

It should be noted that MasterComp is also available in the MasterPack bundle with VintageWarmer and MasterQ for $389.