$549 Weiss DS1-MK3

The fruit of three years’ collaboration between Softube and Weiss, DS1-MK3 is a flawless emulation of the latter’s ultraboutique 1990 mastering compressor/limiter. Having ported the original DS1-MK3 code linefor-line, Softube upped the processing resolution and added new Safety Limiter algorithms, including a True Peak one, to improve performance over the real thing – they also integrated their dreadful new browser, but we won’t dwell on that. Eyewateringly expensive, but for serious mastering engineers, worth every penny.

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