Shadow Hills OptoMax Optical Compressor Plug-In Debuts

New York, NY (September 24, 2025)—The new Shadow Hills OptiMax plug-in, created through a collaboration between the company and Brainworx, focuses in on the Shadow Hills Mastering Compressor’s optical section and revamps it, providing not only the expected replication of the original hardware but also new features that expand into beyond what’s practical in the analog domain.

The result is a compressor with multiple transformer colorations and new modes. New offerings include expanded control, with limited ratio and speed controls (slow, med, fast) intended to unlock new sonic possibilities while retaining the bloom and smoothness of optical compression.

The Left-Right Brain of Shadow Hills Industries’ Peter Reardon

There’s also Push mode, a limiter-style, ultra-fast timing mode for aggressive modern sounds; the ability to switch between Shadow Hills’ Nickel, Iron, and Steel transformer circuits from the original Mastering Compressor for three distinct flavors of harmonic character; a dedicated Tone control that can imbue Air for brilliance or Smooth for pulling back top-end; and options like advanced sidechain (high pass and bell options, SC Listen, external SC, and stereo link), parallel Mix, and a resizable GUI.

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The plug-in is available now with an introductory price of $69 through Christmas, when it moves to its standard MSRP of $150. Shadow Hills OptoMax has also been added to the Plug-in Alliance MEGA Bundle at no extra cost.