A compressor so rare it was basically a ghost now lives in your DAW, its fingerprints already smeared across thousands of masters and a pile of Grammy nods. MB Howies179 captures the NTP 179-120, that near-mythical unit nobody can track down anymore. Metric Halo teamed with mastering legend Howie Weinberg to bottle the exact nuance of his personal pair, right down to the boxtone and distortion baked into his specific boxes.
Weinberg leaned on this recreation, drawing from a 40-plus-year run behind the biggest albums across every genre, dialing in the settings that squeeze the most out of it. The UI stays streamlined while tossing in controls that make running it in the box painless rather than chained to an analog loop. Recallability arrives too, and you break free of being stuck with a single stereo pair.
Weinberg tells the origin himself: built back in 1975 for Neumann's first mastering consoles, the SP 75 and SP 77, it sat bolted into the wall at Masterdisk when he arrived, already furniture. Bob Ludwig rode it, he rode it, and it quietly held records together through the 80s and 90s without ever announcing itself. He still keeps his pair racked in Laurel Canyon, calling it maybe the finest stereo compressor ever made, the honest glue people could never replicate until this.
His pitch lands simply: today's music craves weight, smoothness, and glue rather than more volume. The plugin applies that analog saturation from his actual hardware, resizes to fit your screen, and juggles cross-platform presets through the MH manager. Snag it in VST2, VST3, AU, or AAX on Mac or Windows at 89 bucks introductory before August 20, regularly 179.
Weinberg leaned on this recreation, drawing from a 40-plus-year run behind the biggest albums across every genre, dialing in the settings that squeeze the most out of it. The UI stays streamlined while tossing in controls that make running it in the box painless rather than chained to an analog loop. Recallability arrives too, and you break free of being stuck with a single stereo pair.
Weinberg tells the origin himself: built back in 1975 for Neumann's first mastering consoles, the SP 75 and SP 77, it sat bolted into the wall at Masterdisk when he arrived, already furniture. Bob Ludwig rode it, he rode it, and it quietly held records together through the 80s and 90s without ever announcing itself. He still keeps his pair racked in Laurel Canyon, calling it maybe the finest stereo compressor ever made, the honest glue people could never replicate until this.
His pitch lands simply: today's music craves weight, smoothness, and glue rather than more volume. The plugin applies that analog saturation from his actual hardware, resizes to fit your screen, and juggles cross-platform presets through the MH manager. Snag it in VST2, VST3, AU, or AAX on Mac or Windows at 89 bucks introductory before August 20, regularly 179.
