FabFilter Pro-C2 Review

FabFilter weren’t the first to use colorful, informative and non-skeuomorphic GUIs in their plugins, but they are the first company that comes to mind when I think of thoroughly modern plugins for mixing and mastering. Taking advantage of modern computer displays instead of aping hardware designs of the past, they also tend to make their plugins quite versatile and feature packed, while remaining clutter free and fundamentally quick and easy to use. FabFilter are certainly not the only people capable of creating great looking VST plugin designs, but to my eye they still have the edge when it comes to user friendliness of the control scheme, as well as overall eye candy.

This design philosophy is clearly present their latest compressor Pro-C2, which is available for PC and Mac based digital audio workstations in VST/VST3/AU/AAX/RTAS plugin formats. The first thing you’re likely to notice is the massive gain reduction graph, showing you a trace history of gain reduction and the compression knee. Seeing the shape of the grain reduction on a graph gives you a great visual representation of the compression characteristics and attack and release settings. Those who’d prefer to save screen real-estate, though, can collapse the display (or just the knee graph) to a more classic set of controls. It’s also possible to go full screen in case you want to maximize the visuals.

To the right of the gain reduction graph is an input/output and GR meter, which is horizontal in compact mode, but vertical otherwise. It’s able to display anywhere from 9dB to 90dB of gain, meaning that you can customize the scale of the display to suit your application. When mastering or dealing with sensitive material it’s preferable to devote the full meter to 9dB as you’ll get the highest visual resolution possible.

A new addition to Pro-C2 is the “range” control, which lets you dial in a limit for how much gain reduction can actually take place, something that users of Cytomic’s The Glue or Elysia’s Mpressor will be familiar with. It’s a thoroughly useful addition as it doesn’t change the compression style, but it prevents Pro-C2 from compressing beyond the specified amount. For example, you can compress the quieter parts of a track but set the range to 6dB, thus preventing excessive dynamic range reduction in the louder sections as the compressor will never go beyond 6dB of compression.

Looking again at the GUI, you’ll notice there are some interesting extras tidily embedded as button menus around the conventional controls. These include a variable knee control, up to 500ms hold time, auto-release, auto gain make-up, up to 20ms lookahead, up to 4X oversampling and the audition trigger option. This last feature lets you hear the parts of the audio that are triggering the compression, making it really easy to adjust the lookahead value. If you put the Pro-C2 on a parallel channel and enable this audition mode, you can actually use the Pro-C2 as a makeshift transient enhancer, and it’s surprisingly effective (and will make you feel oh so clever).

The dry/wet mix parameter is present in the form of two separate controls, one for the dry the other for wet signal (which can also be panned), or a scaled mix setting which ranges from 0% to 200%, where anything over 100% actually increases your gain reduction. There’s also multiple levels of Undo/Redo and an A/B comparison function. These combined with the auto gain make-up mean that it’s very easy to truly hear the compression without being fooled by volume changes.

Towards the bottom of the GUI, you’ll find the side-chain tab. Clicking on this tab reveals a slew of extra options, including another graphic display of a 3-band equalizer, complete with a spectrum analyzer. The EQ offers low-pass and high-pass filters, with slopes ranging from 6dB to 96dB and a mid-band which can be switched to bell, notch, band-pass, regular shelves or a tilt shelf. The tilt shelf lets you tilt the entire frequency spectrum up or down, emphasizing one end as you de-emphasis another. This lets you mimic the Thrust setting in API hardware compressors, which can end up sounding louder overall as the low and mid range is compressed less than the high end. A side-chain audition option is handily available when you’re working with these filters.

Also revealed in this section is the M/S configuration button and the stereo link slider. In normal stereo mode, the slider affects the stereo-link between the Left and Right channels, anywhere from 0% to 100%. Going beyond this value will cause the compression to take place increasingly on the Mid or Side channel only, depending on your selection. Alternatively, you set the Mid channel to feed the side-chain for the Side channel’s compression, or vise versa. If that sounded confusing, let me put it this way… You can have the Mid content of your audio trigger the compression, but the compression itself will act mainly or exclusively on the Side channel signal (depending on your stereo link setting). This could also be done the other way around, with the Side channel content triggering compression on the Mid channel. This is again variable with the stereo link slider. The final feature I want to touch on here is the Pro-C2’s ability to trigger compression from MIDI, which is sure to please electronic music producers.

The versatility of the Pro-C2 thus far is impressive, but up until this point I’ve avoided mentioning what is arguably the most exciting new feature: the five brand new compression modes.

The three compression modes from Pro-C 1 that made it so versatile (Clean, Classic and Opto) are still here, along with five new modes: Vocal, Mastering, Bus, Punch and Pumping. These modes change the character of the compression, affecting the attack and release stages, knee and the auto attack and release behavior.

Vocal mode has an automatic ratio and knee, so it’s very easy to set up. It’s able to hold vocals firmly in place without being heavy handed. Combined with the hold and lookahead, it’s very effective on dialogue and would be a great choice for ducking out background music in a broadcast. The Bus mode is a bit more aggressive in its release times, it breathes more and is useful for making everything ebb and flow together. Punch is the analog style all-rounder and its pumping is very EDM friendly. The Mastering mode is my favorite, though. It is notable for its extremely smooth and gentle curves and seems to impart a nice thickness to the sound. My thoroughly unprofessional opinion is that this mode is actual magic. Combined with all the other features on offer, I think that this mode makes Pro-C2 a fantastic mastering compressor.

The quality is obvious throughout the available compression modes and they all fit their names very well. That said, none of the modes are all-out hardware emulations. This suits me fine as I prefer to handle dynamics in a clean way and use something else for saturation/distortion, but those looking for closely matching hardware emulations might find themselves happier with something else.

While the extent of the features on offer is impressive, what’s even more impressive is how well Pro-C2 lends itself to the users needs. Despite the plugin’s deep and complex settings, the workflow never gets clunky or confusing. At the same time, none of these in-depth features get in the way when you just want something simple. Pro-C2 is equally at home being a technical dynamics tool, as it is being a set and forget compressor.

The Verdict

In conclusion, the Pro-C2 is a thoroughly professional tool, supremely versatile yet very transparent in use. It gets out of your way and lets you get on with mixing. I never found it to be a CPU hog, the included presets are fantastic and the documentation is complete and unambiguous (the official demo video is also excellent, you can check it out above). Also, since help tooltips can be displayed by hovering the GUI controls, you’d hardly need to consult the manual at all. On top of all this, I’ve never encountered any instability or bugs while testing Pro-C2.

The list price of $179 is higher than many single algorithm compressors available on the market right now, but FabFilter Pro-C2 is far more versatile than most offerings out there and has the potential to be the only compressor you may ever need. I recommend it highly!

More info: FabFilter Pro-C2 ($179)

Last Updated on June 22, 2016 by Tomislav Zlatic.