reviving old thread...
I got my varimu about week ago as my first (hw) compressor. It is a rev 4 with hipass mod that I bought from a fellow gearslut.
Overall it sounds very very subtle to me in every way. There is no way to force it to do agressive stuff. It can only get uglier, in the extremes or with wrong settings, but it won't change a lot compared to what I'm used with software dynamic killers ;-).
I don't hear any loss of bass. It thickens the lowmids and rolls off some highend, bluntly put. As it was said many times, it softens ... well everything, not too much, but it is quite obvious.
On 2buss I found, it fills nicely a bit sterile mixes... actually I have to say it works quite well on electronic music that is well mixed and on the clean side. It is not for muddy stuff obviously.
I don't think it could be used to make things louder on 2 buss (at least with electronica), because it doesn't really compress the peaks, it rather brings up the stuff in between the beats in a way thats new to me. I tried to push it for some more agressive compression and coloration, but as I wrote above, it doesn't work that way, it only gets uglier and still almost the same in a way. I can see that there is the sweetspot for compression and coloration... as you all said.
The HP mod is a must on 2buss, without it kicks go south very fast, not nicely compressed... HP SC lifts the curse off
I also tried various other stuff...
It was nice on vocals, it can even them out without obvious bad artifacts that I'm used to with plugs.
Dunno what is causing it (my guess falls on transformers), but it has some phase shift on the bottom. That means it changes the symetry of the low freqs. And that means some basses get cured from asymetry and some get (more) asymetric. That could be a problem or not.
I liked it on overheads. It was ok on trumpet... well it depends on if you want things fuller in the low mids and softer on the top... I usualy do like it.
What else? Well just want to say that in my world it hardly compresses on 2buss, even with 2-3dB it is ALMOST like nothing. From my very short expirience with it I percieve it more as a color box with a bit of "glue" on the 2buss and as a nice tool for mixing and tracking, where I can really make it compress ;-).
That's it for now and first contact, obviously I have to learn to work with it and add some more boxes to complement. Thinking about pair of Trakkers and some EQ when money allows.