[cporro]

+1 RNP

personally i never track with compression. as scott mentioned (i
think) if you record in 24bit, and you should, there really is no need
for it. you could have RMS levels of -20 and peaks at -10 and still be
fine. in fact i think that's a far better way to gain stage.

if you are to the point where you can hear differences between
compressors...you can hear differences in settings like attack and
release etc. and your ear says to you "use a compressor when tracking"
then you might want to look into one. otherwise you are guessing imo
and better off skipping it.

as far as a good vocal here are my priorities:
1) good performance.
2) mic placement
3) room sound
4) mic selection

all of these are way more influential then some compressor on the
input.

it took me along time to get this but gear is not magical. ears are.
skill is. engineering is. which is very cool if you think about it.

and there are compressor with parallel compression out there. my daw,
samplitude, comes stock with a very nice one called am-munition. and i
hardly use the setting. ha. but as others have said that hardly a
feature you need as you can easily set it up yourself like the
original NYC engineers did.

if you can compress going in on PT, as some say you can, you need to
either do hardware monitoring for the vocalist or have very low
latency for them. otherwise it can be very distracting. you may be
able to have no monitoring if they sing with one can off an ear. but
latency can be a monitoring issue.