pulsar digital 1178
Pulsar Digital 1178 €149
An emulation of a classic compressor with added extras always gets our attention, but will this new 1178 get your pulse racing?
Emulations of Urei’s iconic 1176 compressor/ limiters are plentiful, but versions of the less common 1178 are harder to find. Pulsar Digital’s latest plugin is 1178 (VST, VST3, AU, AAX), an emulation-plus-extras version of this classic stereo FET compressor.
Similar in style to the 1176, the 1178 has most in common with the later transformerless 1176, and operationally the design should be familiar to many people. The Input knob is used to raise the level to a fixed threshold, and gain make up (Output) is manual. There are four ratio options (4, 8, 12 and 20:1), and Attack and Release can be adjusted smoothly between slow and fast (0 is the slowest, 7 the fastest). Note the plugin has channel specific rather than shared Attack and Release controls and an additional ‘All’ ratio setting to emulate selecting all buttons on the hardware. For convenience a simpler mono instance is also included.