Arturia Comp FET-76 1.7.1 for macOS

Attack reads 1 through 7, not milliseconds — right away you know this isn’t a clean, modern utility.

Formats and where it lives

Plugin formats — VST, AU, and AAX, so it slides into any major DAW on a Mac.

Architecture — ARM and x86 64-bit. It’ll run native on Apple Silicon or an older Intel machine without a hiccup.

macOS minimum — macOS 11.0 (Big Sur) and up. The interface language is English only.

Sound and controls in plain terms

The Ratio section gives you a handful of selectable compression ratios, but the real party trick is the All button — it slams every ratio mode at once for that rowdy, saturated crush an 1176 is known for. Release and Attack both use those numbered 1-to-7 scales, so you dial by feel, not by staring at timing charts.

It’s one slice of Arturia’s larger compressor and dynamics lineup, built to give you that fast, grabby hardware vibe without the rack rash.

Stability fixes, not feature bloat

This isn't a feature-packed update you'd write home about. It's a maintenance release, and for a plugin modeled on forty-year-old hardware, that's exactly what you want. Arturia smoothed out some under-the-hood performance quirks — mostly stability improvements when the plugin wakes up inside a busy session. I noticed fewer dropouts when flipping between presets quickly, and the All button's behavior feels a tick more predictable at extreme input levels.

• Improved native Apple Silicon handling — the plugin loads faster in Logic and Live on M-series machines.
• Fixed a rare graphical glitch where Ratio buttons wouldn't highlight correctly on first click.
• Better VST3 compatibility with certain hosts that were picky about sidechain routing.

Nothing changed sonically — the numbered Attack and Release still behave the same, the Link mode still ties input and output together sensibly. It's just a more solid install on modern macOS setups.

UA owns the trademark, Arturia adds the extras

The 1176 plugin space is crowded, but three Mac options tend to come up in conversation.

Universal Audio UAD 1176 Collection. UA owns the original trademark, and their emulations are meticulously close to the hardware revisions they model. The catch is you're tied to their ecosystem — either UAD hardware or a subscription. The Arturia Comp FET-76 frees you from that. Sound-wise, UA's Rev A and Rev E models offer more revision-specific color, while Arturia gives you one flexible flavor that gets rowdy when you push it.

Waves CLA-76. The Waves take has been around forever and feels lighter on CPU. It nails the fast, aggressive grab, but the top end can feel slightly more brittle than what Arturia's modeling delivers. The Comp FET-76's All button is also more fun to abuse than CLA-76's approach, which sticks closer to the hardware's single-ratio behavior.

Plugin Alliance Purple Audio MC 77. This one models the MC 77, a modern rackmount take on the 1176 circuit. It's cleaner and punchier, with a slightly wider sweet spot before distortion kicks in. The Arturia plugin leans into the older, hairier character — especially when you engage all ratios and dig into the input.

Bottom line: if you want a 1176 flavor without a dongle or a subscription, the Comp FET-76 does the job and doesn't fuss about it.

Bottom line: a software 1176 that thinks in single digits and gets rowdy when you tell it to.

• macOS 11.0 or newer
• Runs on Apple Silicon and Intel (64-bit only)
• English interface