API The Box II

SSL has board mounted jacks and pots and cheaped out the circuits from the Super Analogue days. It’s pretty much a clone now and what they SELL has little in common with the build quality they used to MAKE beyond often being later, cheaper iterations of the same designs. But so are the clones and the Smart C2 is a cleaned up SSL bus. Older SSL rack gear was top notch but nobody wants clean. They’re obsessed with color to hide their crap music played by crap musicians playing crap instruments recorded by crap microphones going through crap circuits. When you see a great guitarist make a dozen albums through a Zoom 505, the problem isn’t the gear, it’s what’s being recorded.

The worst are the plugs they make. Except for the Relab developed X-Verb they were all crap and are still all crap. Now they joined waves in making crappy circuit modeled strips but want hundreds of dollars or to bleed you dry with subscription options. Unless the circuit models do some crazy weird stuff like Soundtoys or the Fuse VCL whatevers, there’s no point to that. The ssl native channel strip comp if you hit peak is so bad and the bus comp behaves nothing like any ssl bus hardware. It physically cannot because they didn’t model the non-linear rectifier that’s partially half-wave for some frequencies and the auto release behavior is a little odd but so are some clones.