Engineer Ken Scott liked the RS124 on Beatles guitar tracks. Another Beatles engineer, Norman Smith, liked using the RS124 for providing glue on the rhythm bus, and the mastering engineers who worked in Abbey Road’s cutting rooms regularly used it as well. Geoff Emerick famously used the RS124 to add a smooth and silky sheen to Paul McCartney’s bass tracks. You can hear the smooth sound of the RS124 on every Beatles record, not to mention on tracks by many other artists who recorded at Abbey Road. The Abbey Road RS124 plugin is a meticulous emulation of a classic tube compressor found only at Abbey Road Studios and is considered a “secret weapon” by the engineers who worked there. We’ve included sound examples, so you can hear the compressors in action. In this article, we compare six of them to see how their features vary and what their relative strengths are. Waves makes a range of compressors highly effective for mix bus use, each emulating different vintage hardware units. There’s no “best” compressor to use for this application, it’s more a matter of finding one that offers the sound and tonal attributes that will give you the results you want for a specific song. Each engineer or recording musician has a slightly different approach. Mix bus compression is an art, not a science. If you wish to listen to higher-quality wav files, please download them here: The audio examples in this article are high-quality mp3’s. In this old-school shootout, we compare 6 different compression flavors for your mix bus.

There’s nothing quite like the glue, punch and excitement that a lightly hit mix bus compressor can add to a song.

Waves fairchild vs uad fairchils