Six of the best they undoubtedly are, but really, with so many worthy plugin bundles on the market, this lot barely qualify as the tip of the iceberg.

Most importantly, all three sound simply amazing, and we can’t recommend them highly enough for those craving that warm, classy old-school vibe. The 4020 Retro EQ features high and low shelving bands, two parametric bands, and low- and high-pass filters while the 4030 Retro Compressor incorporates dry/wet mix control for parallel compression and a sidechain input and the 4040 Retro Limiter keeps things simple with its Ceiling and Gain (up to +36dB) knobs, and is equally at home on the master bus or individual instrument channels. Retro Pack takes in the 4020 Retro EQ, 4030 Retro Compressor and 4040 Retro Limiter, all three of which are built on McDSP’s stunningly authentic analogue modelling algorithms, with the aim of making your in-the-box mixes sounds like they’re coming out of a vintage desk – although no specific real-world hardware is being emulated. Okay, so we’ve contrived this last gong just to get our final entrant onto the list, but this threesome of analogue emulation plugins is so darn good that we couldn’t let it fall through the categorical cracks. Saturn and Pro-R are particularly noteworthy, the first delivering some of the most convincing analogue saturation you’ll hear in the virtual realm, and Pro-R’s ingenious Space control and Decay Rate EQ putting it in a class of its own but Timeless 3’s May 2021 update was a big deal, too, adding feedback FX and extra filters to its arsenal, not to mention a beautiful new GUI.īest for analogue-style mixing on a budget: McDSP Retro Bundle Joining that core trio of must-haves in the Mixing Bundle, Pro-DS, Pro-R, Saturn 2 and Timeless 3 serve up equally stellar de-essing, reverb, multiband distortion and delay. And such popularity is well deserved, as all three plugins set standards in their perfectly balanced combination of depth, features, ease of use and knockout sonics. When it comes to the mixing essentials, you’d be forgiven for thinking that Dutch developers FabFilter have the non-emulation-based market all to themselves, so ubiquitous have their Pro-C 2 compressor, Pro-Q 3 EQ and Pro-G gate become of late.

Alliance mega bundle