Mix Tools

V-PRESS

Name: V-PRESS
Brand: Signature Algorithms
SKU: v-press
Price: 29.00 GBP
Availability: InStock

A multi-use compressor, built vocal-first. Put it on a vocal, move one control, get a finished vocal, or switch the voicing for an instrument, a bus or a master.

10-day trial

See the measurements

Free 10-day trial. The download is the whole collection, 22 plug-ins in one installer, so you can try every one; start V-PRESS's trial from inside the plug-in when you are ready. Downloading does not start it, and trying one plug-in does not start the others.

AU (macOS)
VST3
AAX
macOS Universal
Windows 64-bit
v1.0.0

What it does

One control. Four voicings. Built vocal-first.

No attack, no release, no ratio, no knee, not because they were too hard to expose, but because a compressor that knows what it is on should not need them. One COMPRESSOR knob moves a two-stage compressor, a noise-floor guard and the auto make-up together. The output stays level-matched as you turn it, so you are judging how controlled the sound is rather than how loud it is. Measured on a vocal across the whole knob range, output loudness moves 1.96 dB.

Four voicings take the same one-control design past the vocal: Instrument for a tracked instrument, Bus for glue on a group or mix bus, Master for a pre-master. Each retunes the detector, the ballistics and the make-up calibration, and none of them changes latency. Three characters, Modern, Vintage and Punch, re-voice whichever voicing is chosen.

Inside it is the chain every engineer builds by hand: a slow RMS leveller doing the density and the bring-quiet-words-forward work, into a fast peak catcher that only ever sees consonants and stray peaks. DISPLAY shows what the compressor and the limiter are doing; INPUT EQ shapes what the compressor listens to, and never touches the audio.

Key features

Four voicings, one knob

Vocal is the original tuning, bit for bit. Instrument is a track compressor that still catches a pick or a stick. Bus keeps its attack slow through most of the knob so the drums' transients pass over the top, and its release adapts far less eagerly than a vocal's, because on a whole mix a release that shortens on every drum hit is what pumping is. Master has the gentlest ratios and widest knees in the plugin and a 300 ms programme detector, so the gain follows the song rather than the kick.

Three characters, all level-matched

Modern, Vintage and Punch scale the attack, release, ratio and knee of both stages rather than adding anything to the signal path. Vintage is slower and softer and glues; Punch is faster and tighter and stays out of the way between words. The auto make-up is derived from the final curves, so each character stays within 1 dB of make-up of the others at the same knob position.

INPUT EQ: what the compressor listens to

A side-chain EQ in a panel under the footer: the Low Cut node, up to four bands, a High Cut and a level into the detector. Boost 3 kHz and the compressor reacts harder to 3 kHz; cut the kick out of the detector and a bass-heavy mix stops pumping. AUDITION lets you hear what the compressor hears. At its defaults the EQ is skipped outright, so a session that never opens it renders bit-identically to one made before it existed.

DISPLAY shows the last five seconds

The input's level, the output's, the compressor's gain reduction, the limiter's when it is on, and a dashed line where the compressor starts, all on the meters' own printed scale, so 6 dB of reduction reaches the “−6” line. Switched off, the waveform is back: the coloured spikes are what you hear, the pale ghost behind them what came in.

Two stages, because one cannot do both jobs

Slow and gentle levels beautifully but lets consonants through; fast and hard controls peaks but flattens the performance. V-Press builds the leveller-into-peak-catcher chain in and moves both ends from one control. In the Vocal voicing the detector is shaped for a voice: a +4.5 dB bell at 2.6 kHz toward intelligibility and a −5 dB shelf above 7.5 kHz so sibilants do not duck the word on every “s”.

A limiter with a proof, not a margin

The applied gain can never exceed what the sample needed, and because the smoothing kernel is triangular the gain is continuously differentiable and cannot click. Run inside the oversampled path, the ceiling holds for the reconstructed waveform, not just for the samples. Off means off: it passes everything, overs included, only delayed.

The interface

V-PRESS with DISPLAY on: the centre becomes a graph of the last five seconds, with the input level in white, the output filled in cyan, the compressor's gain reduction in orange hanging from the top, the limiter's line in pink and a dashed threshold line, between the INPUT, GR and OUTPUT meters. — V-PRESS · 1 of 2

V-PRESS with the INPUT EQ panel open under the footer: a curve over the input's spectrum with the low cut node near 90 Hz and one band lifting 3 kHz, an INPUT EQ LEVEL slider and an AUDITION button on the left. — V-PRESS · 2 of 2

How it works

The signal path, as the plugin’s own documentation states it.

input ──► input meter
      ──► oversample (1× / 2× / 4×)
            ├─► sidechain analyser ──► noise floor guard
            │   (undelayed: voicing,──► leveller  (RMS,  slow)
            │    low cut, INPUT EQ) ──► peak      (peak, fast)
            ├─► look-ahead delay (2 ms)
            ├─► compressor gain + auto make-up
            ├─► peak saturator
            ├─► presence
            ├─► mix with dry
            ├─► output gain
            └─► true-peak limiter
      ──► downsample ──► output meter

Audio

Audio demos for V-PRESS are not published yet.

We would rather show you nothing than show you a demo that was not recorded through this plugin.

Measured

VPressTests: 171 checks · Vocal voicing on a synthetic vocal · 48 kHz · voicing levels from QualityBench on material staged as sessions are

Short-term dynamic range (p90−p10), Vocal: 18.5 dB in → 13.1 dB at 100 %
Quiet syllables (p10), Vocal: −28.1 → −24.0 dBFS (+4.1 dB forward)
Output loudness spread across the whole knob range, Vocal: 1.96 dB
Output against bypass, 10–90 % of the knob: Master on a pre-master · Bus on a mix: 0.0 to +0.5 dB · 0.0 to +0.9 dB
Output against bypass, Instrument: bass, kick, snare, kit, guitar, piano, strings: within ±1.8 dB
THD at nominal vocal level (−15 dBFS): −86 dBc (0.005 %)
Limiter overshoot, at every ceiling tested: zero
CPU, stereo, one core: 0.46 % (1×) · 1.10 % (2×) · 1.98 % (4×)
auval: AU VALIDATION SUCCEEDED

Figures are produced by this plugin’s own test suite and benchmark, on the hardware and sample rate named above. They are not estimates.

Controls

THE KNOBS

PRESENCE: 0–100 %. Post-compression clarity, articulation and air.
COMPRESSOR: 0–100 %. Threshold, ratio, ballistics and make-up, all at once, level-matched. Double-click returns it to 45 %.
MIX: 0–100 %. Parallel compression, with the dry path aligned to the sample.
OUTPUT: ±24 dB level trim.
CEILING: −12–0 dBFS. The safety limiter's threshold.

SWITCHES AND MENUS

LIMITER: True-peak safety limiter, on by default. Off, it passes everything, only delayed.
Standard · High 2x · Ultra 4x: Internal oversampling, in the box under LIMITER. Deliberately not automatable, because it changes reported latency.
MODE: One menu, two choices: the VOICING (Vocal, Instrument, Bus, Master) and the CHARACTER (Modern, Vintage, Punch). The box reads them together, as “Vocal · Modern”.
PRESET · SAVE: Step or choose from the factory presets; SAVE writes the current state as a preset file.
COLOR: Warm, Cool or Mono. Tints the waveform and nothing else.
DISPLAY: Swaps the waveform for five seconds of input, output, compressor and limiter gain reduction.
Power: Bypass.

INPUT EQ

LOW CUT: The curve's first node: the detector's 24 dB/oct high-pass, 20–300 Hz. Plosive sensitivity.
BAND 1–4: Bell, low shelf, high shelf or notch, 20 Hz–20 kHz, ±24 dB, Q 0.1–10. Double-click to add or remove one, right-click for its shape, the wheel for its Q.
HIGH CUT: 24 dB/oct, 1–20 kHz. Parked at the right edge it is off.
INPUT EQ LEVEL: ±24 dB of gain into the detector: the same as moving the threshold the other way.
AUDITION: Plays what the compressor listens to instead of the output. The limiter is held on while it plays.

Technical details

Formats, macOS: AU · VST3 · AAX
Formats, Windows: VST3 · AAX
Operating system: macOS 10.15 or later · Windows 10 or later, 64-bit
Architecture, macOS: Universal: Apple Silicon and Intel
Architecture, Windows: 64-bit
Plugin code: Vpr1
Version: 1.0.0
Latency: 3.5 ms (Standard), 4.8 ms (High 2x) or 5.0 ms (Ultra 4x): 168, 231 or 240 samples at 48 kHz. Reported exactly, constant within a setting, and the same in every voicing.
CPU: 0.46–1.98 % of one core, stereo, depending on quality
Factory presets: 100

In ten sections, one sub-menu each and all in the host's own program list: Vocals (19), Speech (8), Drums (12), Bass (9), Guitars (10), Keys & Synths (10), Strings, Brass & Winds (7), Buses (10), Mastering (10) and Creative (5). The eight original vocal presets come first, unchanged. Each preset sets its own voicing and character, and every one is checked end to end on the material it is named for.

Worth knowing

Low-frequency plosives pass through the compressor largely uncontrolled. That is a direct consequence of the detector design, not an oversight: the sidechain high-pass is what stops the compressor ducking the whole word on every “p”. The safety limiter catches them, and it is on by default. Where plosives are a problem, raise the LOW CUT node on the INPUT EQ curve: on an 80 Hz burst, moving it from 20 Hz to 300 Hz takes gain reduction from 17.1 dB to 0.6 dB.
Thresholds are absolute, not program-adaptive. A vocal tracked much quieter than about −40 dBFS will not reach the leveller. An adaptive threshold would make the response depend on material history, which breaks automation reproducibility.
Level matching is tightest at the level each voicing was calibrated for: −15 dBFS RMS for Vocal, material peaking at −4 dBFS for Instrument and −3 dBFS for Bus and Master. Further from those levels the output drifts from bypass, because the auto make-up is analytic and cannot know the input level. Every preset sets OUTPUT as well, measured on its own material.
COLOR tints the waveform only and touches no audio. DISPLAY and the INPUT EQ panel are remembered with the session but are not parameters, so neither appears in a host's automation list.