Baby Audio IHNY-2 is the sequel of a fairly popular parallel compressor, but the bar has been tremendously raised not for Baby Audio only, but for the entire industry.
GUI
The GUI has been totally refreshed and the plugin doesn’t look any similar to its predecessor, that’s also because the plugin goes a lot more in depth and develops on different axises.
The big X/Y pad allows setting how hard the compressor is working and how Wet you want the signal to be.
While that might not sound much more appealing than other alternatives, here’s where the Tweak panel comes.
It has the evergreen Attack, Release, Ratio parameters, but it is also packed with transient shaping, saturation, a smiley eq curve (to emphasize lows and highs), a tilt EQ, and a lo/hi-pass sidechain filter.
At the very bottom, there’s an autogain feature that, unlike most compressor, can be tweaked from 0 to 100%, plus an output gain slider.
How I use it
The huge variety of presets and controls available make it flexible for many tasks, but I can see it shining on drums in particular.
The Harmonics control is something worth experimenting on basses and the instrument bus.
Conclusion
While the X/Y pad is a bit tricky to get used to at first, IHNY-2 comes with a bunch of features that are very welcome.
The Harmonics control is great, but the real gem to me is the smiley EQ curve. In fact, many beginners often overlook the importance of attenuating the midrange when using parallel compression on drums, ending up with an annoying midrangey sound.
I really appreciate how Baby Audio listened to the common sentiment about IHNY was wasting too much space with its interface, and took the chance to exploit every single inch of it with this new version.
I also like how intuitive and visual-based the Tweak parameters are, I’d probably argue that they’re a bit too little to tweak with accuracy, but as an Ableton user I don’t really mind as long as I can control parameters within the stock interface (something that is probably possible on other DAWs too); and, finally, it’s not really that much of a deal considering that most details are going lost in parallel, so it’s safe to say that approximate values would do the job as well.
The look is also insanely appealing, modern and clean.
Here you can buy Baby Audio IHNY-2
