Baby Audio’s Parallel Aggressor is an all-in-one stereo limiter/compressor/saturator plug-in with a three-channel mixer to blend combinations of the Dry plus two other versions of the same audio signal.
All three signals are phase-locked together and available at the same time as: Dry or the original audio, a heavily compressed duplicate called Spank, and Heat is a well-saturated copy.
Parallel processing is nothing new—most stereo plug-ins have wet/dry controls but Parallel Aggressor is designed to give you more control and tonality characters but without elaborate plug-in configurations.
Spank is a punchy compression algorithm that takes up where Baby Audio’s “I Heart NY” plug-in left off but with sonic improvements, better signal detection and flexibility. Spank can be further tailored with injection buttons: Extra Punch, Extra Smack, Sidechain Filter and Mono, where the Spank audio is summed to the center of the mix leaving the Dry and Heat components in full stereo.
Heat is analog-modeled saturation with an aggressive bite. It is based on Baby Audio’s tape saturator from Super VHS and also has its set of injection buttons labeled Extra Hot, Tone, HP Filter and LP Filter. Heat by itself is a useful distortion plug you can get very fuzzy with.
Lastly, Auto Gain matches output level to the Dry signal and is good for experimenting while still keeping legal levels, or when you’re in a hurry getting a demo mix done!
Parallel Aggressor from Baby Audio sells for $49 to download and runs in VST, VST3, AU and in AAX hosts.
