New Music Gear Monday: Maag Audio Magnum-K Dual Compressor Plugin

The cynical engineer looks at compression these days and says, “It’s all already been done. The world doesn’t need another classic compression emulation.” While the second part of that statement may well be true, the fact of the matter is that there are still new ideas in compressors being released and one of the them is the Maag Audio Magnum-K.

Modeled from the Cliff Maag Sr.‘s personal hardware compressor used on projects in his studio, the Magnum-K plugin (distributed by the Plugin Alliance) is unique in several ways.

First of all, it’s comprised of two compressor sections (the Magnum Comp and the K Comp), combined with Maag Audio’s famous parallel EQ with LMF and Air Band®, and a soft limiter on the output. It also features a transparent input attenuator, input gain, extensive sidechain capabilities, and makeup gain, along with detented controls for recallable settings and channel matching.

But the plugin goes a step further by incorporating Brainworx TMT technology, which may be a first for a processor other than a channel strip. TMT takes the real-world tolerances of audio components found in audio circuits into account and offers various channels of analog audio which have realistic variances in frequency response, time constants in dynamic sections, etc. As a result, each channel of the plugin sounds slightly different, which provides a much more realistic analog simulation, especially when using it on multiple tracks of a session.

Anyone that’s used the Maag Audio EQ-4 knows how musical the EQ is (especially the fantastic Air band), and the Magnum-K has that same unique approach. Cliff realized early in his career that he needed to be able to control the edginess that often appears in vocals, horns, and guitars, all which tends to occur around 2.5kHz. Creating what was perhaps the first dynamic EQ, he built a compressor that would just decrease the harshness at 2.5kHz when it occurred instead of statically reducing that frequency band, which might lose some desirable sonics at various points in the track.

The Magnum-K could take that crucial midrange band right up to the point just before discomfort and controls it, making tracks sound much more powerful as a result.

The Maag Audio Magnum-K dual compressor plugin is truly innovative and something definitely worth checking out. It lists for $299 but is currently on sale for just $199 with a free 14 day trial period available. You can find out more here, or on the video below.

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