Emperical Labs EL-9

Good definitely ! Super ugly yes but I find every Empirical Labs piece kind of ugly.

The preamp is great, very clean, lots of detail, not super vibey but that's what the saturation section is for.
The compressor is nice, not a distressor but definitely in the same family. If you don't like the distressor grab or sound you probably won't like this one. Super cool on drum rooms, bass, works on vocals.
I didn't like it on acoustic guitars ( the compressor )

My only gripe with the unit is that I find it a bit convoluted.
You can't control the saturation and the compressor independently, which seems kind of odd to me. TO access some of the functions you have to hold different buttons at the same time.
The studio I worked at had a pair and I used them all the time for percussive stuff, snare, drum rooms , overly bright tambourines ( you can really tame the annoying high end of some instruments with this ). The sound was always great but you had to fiddle with it a little bit ( I did at least ).

Nowadays I work exclusively as a songwriter and I tried it in my new setup but didn't keep it because I wanted things that helped me move fast. Maybe I'm a bit too impatient but I chose simple equipment that just works, set it and forget.
So for my money I'd rather have a preamp that I can push easily into satuation followed by a simple opto 2 button compressor a la LA2A...