running tracks through tube compressor on bypass for tone,?

Bg2 great for that.
Save money - locomotive weight tank!

Both my Thermionic Phoenix MP and Retro STA Level are used primarily as tone boxes
I'm usually just tickling the GR needle.

I use Varimu plugins as tone boxes, guitar and bass compressors, and vocals enhancers.
The hardware without solid state side chains tends to have more consistent distortion than gain reduction behavior in most units because most tube revival gear is distorted by design, inadequate ventilation leading to heat issues often from the unit’s design, proper maintenance is extremely expensive in both time and money, and tubes are currently made only in former communist economies to communist quality. For gain control devices, they are just an outmoded technology.

Dan

If you didn't want compression and wanted to stay in 500 series the LTL Mr Focus with Pentode 2 and Mass Driver makes for one nice and weighty tone box.

get back to me after you've repaired a few dozen vintage tube comps. : ).   The traditional rectifier position is for 60Hz AC into a (much more heavily filtered) power filter section, this is for wide band audio into a timing cap and resistor network that feeds a tube grid directly.  Anything goofy shows up in the compression sound, and sometimes even below compression threshold; like no compression, pull the side chain rectifier and the sound gets a lot cleaner.   The 6AL5 (Stalevel, etc) does this suprisingly frequently. 

very interesting. Makes sense. Could there be control voltage bleeding through into the audio path?

The best “Varimu” distortion plugs I’ve found are MJUC’s bottom panel distortion knob and the Fuse VCL-864U. The hardware federal for this use is ridiculous now at 2000-4000 usd but I don’t know what else besides guitar distortion anyone not a nouveau riche lofi rapper or pop star would use it for. I don’t know who would use a Manley for distortion either. People pay thousands for intentionally distorted hardware that sounds like a plastic digital product now so what do I know?

There's something about the envelope of all my hardware compressors both solid state and tube that plugins just fail to get right.

Technically, plugins are great - but they just don't have that special "elasticity" of my hardware comps.

I do use many plugin compressors on my DAW channels but for tracking and my stereo bus it has to be hardware.

THAT VCA ICs are cheap and clean now. They are limited only by creativity and design prowess but most of the cleaner vca compressors are off the market after the industry switched to digital and nothing hardware has replaced them except for digital. The distortion from the modulation of the signal is greater than any harmonic distortion in the amplifiers on better vca designs. The only thing is that the VCAs still have certain circuitry in them that has a tone and most of the non THAT VCAs that sounded a little different are discontinued. The distortion in other types of compressors has been drastically reduced in modern designs too but many of them have parts availability or quality issues resulting in discontinuation of manufacturing.

People stopped buying the workhorse equipment so we are left with a market filled mostly with muntzed clones and distorted crap sold with the lie that they can fix poor recordings and lack of musical talent and production skill.

Digital world is also mostly distorted crap that doesn’t even try to work right.

Doug, by now you know I’m not disagreeing with you, but if you get the time your after and keep iin mind you probably are dealing with everything Doug as said, if it works it works.

First rule of audio and I know Doug agrees with this never knock what works. We have to add the modern carve out you really need to know what it is that makes it work!

I sold off all of my hardware and went in the box

Interesting. Good explanation thanks! 

My experience in a couple decades of screwing around w/ guitar amps is that the rectifier just never affects much. Hear all these tales about how 'ya just gotta have NOS glass and I'd pay big bucks for a 5AR4 pop it into a Fender and go huh? At best it altered headroom slightly. Little more or less sag. Some felt stiffer under fingers but tone..? Never like rolling tubes through the V1... changing that first 12ax7. That's almost always a major difference! 

Anyway..!  

Got me thinking... whenever I've used old junk like a Collins 26U or Federal... there's no bypass switch. Bypass = patch around it. 

And then some other older, yet slightly more modern designs... 1176LN there's no bypass. Not really. We can bypass the compression circuit but the line amp... input & output stages are always in line. Same with the 160VU there's no bypass. Either turn ratio to 1:1 or patch around the thing. 

So? What's the first compressor that actually had a bypass button? When did those start showing up? By the time I started doing this crap in the 90s everything had a bypass switch...