The Abbey Road Plug-ins RS124 Compressor is a plug-in emulator of a 1960's valve compressor used at Abbey Road. I haven't used a hardware compressor that looks like this ever, and I'm not sure what model specifically it would be modeled after. As far as getting the plug-in up and running goes, it should be pretty simple to install it on any given system, but I haven't done it myself since the one I've used is on the studio's system where I work. The interface of the RS124 Compressor plug-in is really simple, whether you've used a compressor with this kind of make up or not. The main parameters are knobs for input control, output, and recovery. It has a couple of other things in the interface, but mostly just to make it look like a vintage piece of gear. I haven't had a need to look at a manual for this plug-in...

SUITABILITY/PERFORMANCE

I don't own this plug-in at home, but I've used the Abbey Road Plug-ins RS124 Compressor at the studio where I work. We're running it in a Pro Tools HD system that runs with on an Apple Mac Pro desk top consisting of a 2.66 dual Intel Xeon processor and 10 GB of RAM. We never have performance issues on this system, so it's hard to say how it might run on a lesser system...

OVERALL OPINION

The Abbey Road Plug-ins RS124 Compressor isn't my favorite of the Abbey Road plug-ins, but it's still useful and has a sound of it's own. It isn't the cleanest compressor, but if you're looking to add a bit of body to your sound via a compressor, this will work. It seems like you need to crank it pretty high to get a full sound out of, although I guess this will depend from application to application. This is a really simple plug-in, so it's nice that it doesn't take much to get a good sound. If you're interested in getting a unique compressor for your system, definitely check out all of the Abbey Road Plug-ins and specifically the RS124.