These factors play a huge role in the sound of my reverbs, for example. There's also the tonality and harmonics they impart, and the subtle stereo emphasis that comes from unlinked compression. 1 compressor doing 4 dB gain reduction tends to sound much more dramatic than 4 compressors each doing 1 dB gain reduction. Stacking compressors with complimentary time settings allows for a more complex and natural sounding gain reduction in my experience. The needles are barely moving in most cases. It's not like if I take these plugins off the mix disappears.
Generally anything beyond that is better left to the mastering engineer rather than the mixing engineer. wrote: A mix (pre mastering stage) shouldn’t require much if any 2buss processing to sound good if the individual components are treated properly.
