Voxengo’s Marquis compressor is a VST and PC based plug-in designed for use in any compatible DAW. Although Voxengo does have a good amount of free plug-ins available, this isn’t one of them. I’m no longer running this plug-in now that I’ve got a Mac, where this isn’t compatible. Installing this on my PC a few years ago wasn’t difficult, as it was as straight forward as following the step by step instructions as you would with any plug-ins. The interface of the plug-in will definitely require some prior knowledge about compressors, but for those who do have some experience with compressors, this should be pretty easy to use. While it isn’t your basic compressor make up, it does share many familiar parameters. These include knobs for threshold, ratio, knee, detector mode, dry, output level, attack, release, and force. It also has a three band filter for further control. It has a few different graphs here to help you monitor what you’re doing, which is definitely nice. A manual might be a good idea to have around if you’re new to compressors and dynamic processors in general.


SUITABILITY/PERFORMANCE

I don’t run this plug-in any more, but when I did it was on a Hewlett Packard Pavilion dv8000 lap top PC with a 3.0 Ghz processor and 2 GB of RAM. I ran the plug-in in Cubase SX. I’m now running Pro Tools on a Mac, so I’m currently unable to this plug-in at all. I don’t remember ever having any performance issues with this plug-in, as the aforementioned system was adequate enough to run a few of these at a time without issues.


OVERALL OPINION

While the Marquis compressor plug-in has a pretty good sound quality, I’m not sure that it’s worth the asking price. It should probably be about the half the price, considering that it only comes in VST format and is only compatible on PC’s. It’s fine for some doing some basic mixing, but I wouldn’t use it on a big budget recording at all, as there are plenty of other plug-in compressor options out there that I’d use over this one. It’s still worth checking out the demo, as in the big picture of plug-ins it’s still a cheap one, but most DAW users out there won’t be able to use it any way…