Voxengo VariSaturator
What can I say? These plugins are the bees knees! Crunchessor, GlissEQ and VariSaturator make an absolutely killer plugin team; stick them on each of your audio tracks and you have a key which unlocks a whole new sonic world of possibilities.
I have to say, Crunchessor is a FINE compressor, absolutely spectacular on everything from drums to vocals and all in between, with a whole range of different compressor types, from clean to vintage models. I'm not sure if this is emulating a hardware compressor, but it's definitely doing something right!
GlissEQ is one of the most flexible and versatile EQ plugins I have ever worked with. This analyses the audio as you work and gives you an extremely detailed spectrum analysis of your audio, allowing you to make informed decisions on where to boost or cut. If you leave the dynamic control alone, it provides a great EQ experience and will only allow your sound to be made better. Anyone new to EQ should get this, it's superb. Even better, if you have recorded frequencies over 24kHz, like on a vocal take recorded through a top quality mic, GlissEQ lets you observe all frequencies up to 48kHz and beyond, so you can add that airy quality to your vocal tracks.
VariSaturator, in my opinion, is just brilliant. If EQ doesn't quite work, use this instead and you have your solution. Brilliant on drums and guitar tracks.
If you are considering buying some top quality plugins, I would definitely recommend Voxengo time and time again, and I can almost guarantee you will be more than satisfied. If there is one thing I would love to see from Voxengo, it would be the manufacture of yet more stellar processors for audio applications.
Max