PSP Flare Review

Ask any producer what the best compressor in their plugin folder is, and you may struggle to get a straight answer – they’ll likely preface their reply with “It depends”.

The best compressor for any particular job is influenced by a myriad of factors like:

• The instruments you’re compressing
• The genre you’re working in
• How much character you want to add
• Whether you’re working on a mix bus or individual track.

There are plenty of “classic” compressors from the past 50 years that famous producers swear by. However, in recent years, developers have been putting out plugins that are pushing the boundaries of what compressors can do.

PSPaudioware’s PSP Flare is one such example. It promises to deliver exceptional volume consistency without the audible artefacts you’d typically associate with heavy compression.

It was initially developed for TV and film postproduction, but does it have a place in your music production workflow? Let’s put it to the test and find out!

Heavy compression without the crunch

PSP Flare was originally the brainchild of sound designer, mix and broadcast engineer Paolo Pasquariello. Pasquariello – who has decades of experience in the music, television and game industries – had envisioned a compressor which could compress based on perceived loudness rather than peak levels at any given moment.

He wanted a whisper and a shout that peaked at the same levels to be compressed differently. PSPaudioware ran with that idea and they delivered.

Flare is a psycho-acoustic compressor that is capable of providing tens of decibels of gain reduction without destructive processing kicking in.

In my testing, I was able to hit an impressive gain reduction of around 65 dB without introducing audible artefacts into the original signal. That’s very impressive, but a producer would rarely need to achieve these crazy levels of compression. In day-to-day use, I care more about how it sounds in a typical context, and how easy it is to use.

Parameters you’d expect

PSP Flare comes with all the parameters you’d expect to see on a modern plugin compressor. Control compression timing with attack and release, compression amount with threshold and ratio, and fine-tune things with lookahead, sidechain high-pass, sidechain link and a global mix knob.

After the compressor, there are Makeup and Gain sliders, and you can turn auto gain on at the press of a button.

The Makeup fader rages from 0 to 40 dB of gain. This is useful, but in most cases, it’s unlikely producers will need more than 5 or 6 dB of makeup. So, it would be nice if the slider was scaled differently to reflect the more common use cases of this particular parameter. This is a minor quibble, however.

Handily, there’s also a dedicated limiter at the end of the chain. This allows you to catch any unwanted peaks that may slip through.

You can activate and deactivate the compressor and limiter sections individually for extra control – a nice touch.

There’s also a large, easy-to-read meter section in the middle of the plugin where you can monitor input, output and gain reduction.

Interestingly, you can zoom in and out on the meter section. This allows you to see up to 80dB of gain reduction, or zoom in so that the maximum gain reduction on the read-out is 16 dB. This is a smart design decision from PSPaudioware, making Flare adaptable to a range of contexts.

A solid sound

PSP Flare’s artefact-free gain reduction means you can squash anything you like into a sausage-shaped waveform, but most of the time music producers won’t want to use a compressor in this way.

Fortunately, as well as extreme dynamics reduction, PSP Flare is more than capable of musical and natural-sounding compression.

By playing with the Attack, Release, and Lookahead parameters it’s easy to achieve smooth compression that bulks up an individual instrument while maintaining the dynamics that are so key to the life of musical recordings.

PSP Flare sounds lovely when used on dynamic recordings like pianos or vocals, but perhaps where it shines brightest is on a sub-group or mix bus.

For example, when used on a drum bus, PSP Flare allows hi-hats and cymbals to come forward without dampening the punch of kicks and snare.

Likewise, on a mix or master bus, this compressor brings everything together, providing “glue” and helping to turn a DAW project into a cohesive song.

The plugin comes with 92 solid presets that can be accessed through the well-presented preset browser. Filter by Application and Designer, or view just the presets you’ve created yourself.

There are undo and redo buttons that are always nice to have, and PSPaudioware also provides users with the ability to switch between A and B configurations so you can experiment and compare results easily.

A solid compressor for your collection

PSP Flare is a great-sounding, easy-to-use compressor that performs excellently as a transparent, practical mixing tool.

You probably won’t find yourself using PSP Flare in lieu of an 1176 or LA 2A as it doesn’t provide much in terms of warmth or character. But that’s kind of the point of PSP Flare.

It’s a great utility compressor that enables you to control dynamics in a natural way without introducing unwanted artefacts. It sounds equally at home on individual tracks, or on mix buses and groups, bringing individual elements together and giving them a little extra polish.

It’s always nice when developers opt to push boundaries and do things with the software medium that could never have been possible in the analogue days of old. PSP Flare is a great example of this, and though most producers are unlikely to use it for extreme gain reduction regularly, it’s always nice to have tools that are capable of unusual things.

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