Baby Audio IHNY-2 NY Parallel Compressor Plugin

Baby Audio is now three years old and therefore at crawling age. For the birthday, the manufacturer takes on the first own plugin again and improves it in the important places. IHNY-2 or I Heart NY 2 audio plugin takes on New York Compression again, a popular studio trick for more punch and more powerful sound.

New York Compression is a simple trick with a big impact. You take the drum bus, vocals, guitar tracks, or the entire mix and mix it down to an ultra-hard compressed copy. In this way, you achieve a sound that retains the dynamics of the original, but at the same time gets more pressure and maybe a pinch of “crunch”. This method is usually called parallel compression.

With IHNY-2, Baby Audio is now presenting the new version of a plugin that takes care of exactly this task and presents it to you with a very intuitive operation. You should not necessarily deal with many parameters, but only with the sound of the result.

In the middle of the interface sits a large glowing circle. This represents nothing more than an X/Y pad, where you adjust the effect of the compressor on the horizontal axis and the mix ratio between the unprocessed and FX signal on the vertical axis.

The plugin is intended to deliver a sound that is particularly well suited to modern genres with “clinical” and aggressive compression. Previous DBX branded hardware serves as inspiration.

At the push of a button, the tweak panel opens, and with it setting options that were not available on the predecessor. Attack and release as well as the ratio can be set here, punch increases the effect of the transients even with very strong compression.

To give the compressor a bit of character, you control a kind of saturation with Harmonics. The stronger the compression, the higher the saturation of the signal. Autogain takes over the plugin, a small slider controls the intensity.

But that’s not all. ‘Shape’ offers you different EQ curves for bass and treble, plus a tilt EQ. The “Lo + Hi Preserve” function, which prevents these frequencies from becoming too “musty” through processing, is used for even more control over bass and treble.

IHNY-2 also has up to fourfold oversampling, solo and bypass functions, and other small extras for the convenient operation of the plugin.

Baby Audio IHNY-2 runs as VST, VST3, AU, and AAX on macOS (10.7 or later – native support for Apple Silicon) and Windows (7 or later). A PDF manual is available for download also.