UA’s HIC Discounts, Danexit and counseling

I'm sure it's nice but all of these vintage compressors work the same way where you push them into the part of their gain reduction, input, or whatever where they're program dependent based on their smoothing filter and ratio. Think an LA2A or SSL but of course it will vary massively ime but they're all just compressors that do not let you set what parts of the program will be influenced and often it is an unintended consequence of the hardware that they worked with like the secondary release charging time bleeding into the primary attack low pass that slows down the gain reduction to smooth the filter as the compressor approaches its target gain reduction or will slow it down drastically, providing a sometimes intentional secondary leveling effect that later compressors and broadcast compressor recognized as positive and recreated in an often more controllable way. You cannot control the amount of wanted gain reduction you want beyond a certain point with the same behavior because the amount of good gain reduction where it respects the material will vary with the ratio (or amount of dc offset to push it further along the transfer curve) and attack rates meaning that less or more gain reduction with the same behavior can only be accomplished by re-setting the compressor where the new settings will have a different sweet spot and you must set it by ear regardless of the markings on the meter or front. the couple of knob compressors like the LAs and DBX (way more modern but still a few knobs compressor) sort of make this easier on the user to not change them out of sweet spots where they have beneficial modulation but this of course greatly limits overall utility, reduces creativity in envelopes, etc. they often force you to over compress or under compress the signal and have their flaws fixed by hand or further processing and often this is not as simple as shoving a limiter before the la2a or after the dbx 160. I've had to deal with that multiple times to the point of parallel compressors into limiters and then upward compressors to fix the suck down and pumping. After being forced by an artist to recreate his performance the Old Style compressors had ruined with automated expanders and fader rides, I have soured on things.

MBC usually ruin things if used more than a couple db. It almost sounds like in your face, spectrum filled with harmonics that don't really relate to the original weirdness and full ness to me. Even DynOne, which has the nice peak/rms blend, program dependent attack/release per band, killer sheen but it almost sounds better to me in single band, which I guess negates its reason for existence.

I'm wasting a lot of time posting here.

So I should keep buying more?

I know armchair psychiatrists do way more worse than good in the world, but it honestly sounds like you just need an inspiring session with some good musicians. They're still out there. It's easy to think as pessimistically about musicians as a whole, but I think it's because so many more people can pursue their musical aspirations now that it feels like the overall quality of players as a whole has dipped. I hope you can find something that makes you happy.

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Back to UA topic for a second. Since this is all about how UA is not doing well to the pre-existing userbase and catering to newer clientele -- Are there still crazy deals available or to look out for as someone who is interested in a few UAD plugins? Or is the roughly $30-50 USD sale range as good as it gets?