I think it's gain staging saturation which is part of the "vintage vibe" that everyone wants.digitalboytn wrote: Even with the signal just passing through those plugins with no compression or limiting,something "nice" happens to the sound...
I prefer stuff like Compassion because it can be programmed to behave like a vintage analog compressor without the saturation. Sometimes too much saturation can be a bad thing
However sometimes when it's used subtley in a big mix it can definitely add a bit of depth and "glue" to the overall mix.