Hardware Tube Compressors/Limiters

[JamesN]

So I have become obsessed with the sound characteristics achievable from a compressor/limiter with a tube. That rich, warm, juicy sound is like hearing music again for the first time. I messed around with routing Traktor in to some VST plugins that emulate it but ran in to latency and eventual distortion over time issues.
I have turned to finding a good piece of hardware that will do this the right way, but hopefully at an affordable price. I am new to the whole realm of mastering but have done some research and came across this unit: http://www.sweetwater.com/store/detail/MDX2600/
It appears to be a good all in one unit and has "tube emulation", which obviously isn't the real thing, but I understand that true tube's can cost quite a bit so this is a sacrifice.
I just wanted to get a few opinions if any one has used this, or found any other compressor/limiters out there that will give me that warm sound at a reasonable price. Also, I have also been reading about sonic maximizers as well, that seem to provide a lot of the same characteristics as a tube might, what are advantages of this versus tube?
Thanks for the read, and have a nice day.

[Sample Seven]

If you're going to go with "tube emulation" I'm sure there are VST plugins out there that can do that instead of an outboard unit.

Also, for ~$300 you can pick up this tube compressor from ART:
http://www.musiciansfriend.com/pro-a...ube-compressor

[mostapha]

That Art is the only budget-conscious version i can think of off the top of my head that I'd consider. The Behringer listed is, well, Behringer. It's not a bad piece if you just want a compressor, but it won't give you what you're looking for.

Also, the FMR RNC and RNLA are options…but they don't have balanced IO, which I think means they're not viable for this use.

I have other suggestions that'd be better at it, but they're all more expensive than CDJ-2000s.

One other thing you can do……what exactly do you like about the tube compressor? Is it just light tube saturation in the output gain stage? Do you like squashing already-mastered music even more? If it's the former, I'd consider getting nice DI boxes and running your mixer into them and then some colored mic preamps.

Again, not the cheapest thing in the world…but something like a Slate Pro Audio Fox would give you a lot of control to tune what kind of sound you were getting…or something like a pair of GAP pre73s might sound really awesome. Unfortunately, there's a huge can of worms that this opens up…the differences between preamps are very subtle and they get expensive quick.