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Product of the Week: Empirical Labs Arousor LT Plug-in

A lower-cost version of the popular Arousor plug-in, which provides an emulation of the famed Distressor hardware unit.

If you like the idea of owning the Empirical Labs Arousor plug-in—which emulates the company’s popular Distressor hardware unit—but don’t want to spend $199, you’ll be pleased to know about Arousor LT (Mac/Windows). It’s a feature-reduced version of the Arousor at a fraction of the cost, and it offers that classic Distressor sound. 

When opening Arousor LT, you’ll see that it looks like the top portion of Arousor. The gain reduction meter and the four main knobs—IN (input), ATT (attack speed), REL (release speed) and OUT (output level)—are all the same. One big difference is that Arousor LT gives you considerably fewer ratio choices. Where Arousor offers 12, Arousor LT gives you just four: 1:1, 3:1, 8:1 and 20:1. 

If you’re unfamiliar with Arousor (or Distressor), you may be scratching your head about the 1:1 ratio. It’s there so you can apply the unit’s excellent saturation capabilities without compression. 

A comparison of the GUIs of Arousor and Arousor LT shows the latter lacks the entire lower control section, including the Attack Modification (AtMod) knob, the Saturation knob, the Detector HP filter knob, the Detector Sidechain EQ and the Blend control (for dialing in parallel effects). Instead, Empirical Labs set each of these parameters to static values. Fortunately, their choices for each are eminently usable.

According to the company, Arousor LT uses the “identical processing” as Arousor. If you want the flavor of the Distressor but don’t need deep tweaking, you’ll be pleased with the new plug-in. Even with the cut-down feature set, you can still dial in a wide variety of iconic Distressor-style compression and saturation effects. I tried it out on drums, bass and electric guitar and was highly pleased with the results.

If you purchase Arousor LT before July 8, you can get it for only $49. After that, it goes up to its regular price of $79, which is still excellent for a Distressor-emulating plug-in.

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