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The trend among plug-in designers is to integrate commonly used processes such as EQ and compression into a single plug-in. It saves on insert slots, but do channel strips offer any other benefits, and which ones stand out from the crowd? There has been a mild explosion of channel strip plug-ins in the Pro Tools universe recently, so I thought it would be good to take a look at what makes them tick. Do they offer anything you couldn't get by using separate EQ and compressor plug-ins, or are they just a clever marketing trick to get us to buy more plug-ins? And which ones shine from the bunch?

The most obvious reason for using channel strip plug-ins is to free up insert points. There is a brick-wall limit of five insert points on each track in Pro Tools, and you can quite quickly fill them up with routine plug-ins. For example, on a vocal track you might have an EQ followed by a pitch-correction plug-in, compressor, de-esser and reverb or delay. If you then wanted to add, say, a treble enhancer or an ADT effect, you'd find all your plug-in slots already used up. A channel strip plug-in that combined at least some of these functions would free up some insert points. Another potential advantage is that having one plug-in window covering all the channel strip functions would help to simplify and streamline our workflow, compared with having five plug-in windows open simultaneously to manage and make adjustments on all these separate plug-ins. Different manufacturers incorporate different features into their channel strip plug-ins, but for the purposes of this article, a plug-in must have at least an EQ and a dynamics section to be considered a channel strip.

We have 11 channel strip plug-ins under test here, and the table above (click to enlarge) lists the details of exactly what each plug-in includes, along with my comments on each one and measurements of the system resources they require. The test for how many would fit on an HD DSP chip was reasonably easy. With the System Usage window open and on Gas Gauge, I just added instances of a particular plug-in until they filled a chip.

However, measuring the processor use of the RTAS versions was a little trickier. In the end I had the Mac OS Activity Monitor window open and noted the increase in percentage processor use when I added 32 instances of a particular plug-in, the idea being to simulate a situation where one channel strip plug-in was used on every track of a 32-track session. I was able to achieve figures in excess of 100 percent because my system is based on a dual 1.42GHz G4 mirror door Mac, making my ceiling 200 percent. The figure for internal bit depth shows what the internal headroom of each plug-in will be like, where that information is available: some manufacturers have not published information on this. Remember that you still need to watch your level architecture even with double-precision plug-ins, as although the plug-in may be able to handle the extra level, you may experience headroom problems once it gets out. To test each plug-in's sound quality, functionality and ease of use I took an existing vocal track which already had all five insert points in use.

I then used each channel strip plug-in in turn and tried to replace at least the EQ and compressor in such a way that I could reproduce the same sound, or even maybe improve on it. The vocal in question has a wide dynamic range that will test the compressor sections well, and the original sound needed warming and brightening, hence the requirement for EQ. One of the obvious benefits of a channel strip plug-in is that you have control over your EQ, gate and compressor from within a single window. However, to keep the graphical user interface (GUI) sensible, a number of the manufacturers have chosen to make compromises such as losing the graphical displays of the EQ and/or dynamics sections. Providing there is good dynamics metering telling me what is going on in the dynamics section, I would prefer to lose the dynamics display, as a graphical display of the EQ curve is a lot more useful.

The plug-ins also vary as to whether they include side-chain EQ. While this is a helpful feature, it isn't a deal-breaker for me, as the most frequent use of side-chain EQ is for de-essing, and to do that properly you need a proper de-esser with a frequency-selective side-chain and signal path. Waves Audiotrack Audiotrack (above) is, in essence, a Waves Q4 and a slightly simplified C1 compressor/gate put together in one plug-in, and is available as part of their Gold Bundle. Waves have maintained the EQ graph from Q4, but have had to lose C1 's dynamics graph as well as its side-chain EQ. The display is clean and simple, though the EQ graph is a little smaller than on a Q4 plug-in, which makes adjustments using the graph slightly more fiddly. The compressor and gate section are very clear, the metering shows what is going on very well, and Waves are to be commended for making Audiotrack one of the most DSP-efficient plug-ins in this test. The sound of this plug-in is impressively clean, especially as it is Waves' budget channel strip; they don't make enough of this efficient and clean-sounding plug-in.

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