What MultiBand Compressor Do You Prefer?

Many MBC plugins on the market and everyone has favorites.  Which one do you like best and prefer for mastering?

I'm no fan of these things, but I would say that Ozone is close to the top of the pile if you really need one.

I'll repeat myself from your other thread, but others may be watching ...
I like the Sonitus for surgical corrections - the UI is great for that kind of work, and it's very effective.  On the rare occasion that I use MBC for mastering, it's usually Ozone.

MBC is one of the most abused tools I've ever seen.  However, on those rare occasions where you need it, it's great.  I recently used Ozone'S MBC on a mastering project.  I almost always prefer single-band compression, but the mix I recieved needed slight repair.  It was, overall, a really good mix.  But some master bus compression had been added and, at times, the kick was causing the mix to duck.  During musical parts it was fine, but when there was singing, the vocal ducking was audible.  I used Ozone's MBC to minimize this effect and it worked really, really well.

So why Ozone?  I have several MBC plug-ins on my machine.  First of all, Ozone has a full multband dynamics suite, not just compression.  It is, by far, the most feature-rich dynamics processor I've seen, as everything can be adjusted for each individual dynamics module, as well as each band.  That means that you can set 12 different attack times simultaneously.  It's those options that I love.  Also, it doesn't have a 'sound'...Completely neutral.  It does exactly what I tell it to do.

I like AA 3.0 Multiband Compression: Adjustments by hand.....

- Pop Master
- lower db output gain ~ 3dB
- turn off brick wall limiter - sounds terrible with it on
- slide each of the 4 bands - left / right - to find sweet spot when music sounds best
- reduce amount of compression per band to just what needs compression - if any at all

The bottom line here is to use just bare minimum of MBC for presence effect. Follow this with FFT filtering to tighten bass / highs: modify one of the mastering templates to taste.
To keep the mix honest with punch yet letting the mix breathe open, I add a slight anount of hardlimiting: 0.5 to 2.1 dB.
Finally, I like to see audio peaks and lows in a 2 trk mix. No solid wall of green.

Agree that often MBC is often very overdone/overused/abused. But it definitely has its place.
We use it sometimes in work we generate start to finish,  but more often with things that
come in from outside.

Mostly have used Ozone 3's multiband, though lately have also used the
one UA makes for their cards with some success.  It was very helpful recently
in trying to tame a mixed project that came in with a lot of HF spikes throughout. 
It worked better on that than anything else we tried and I really
liked the result. 

It's also been very helpful where we got in dialog recorded in Japan and the
UK,  and had to build up sections where characters recorded there were back/forth
with others we'd recorded ourselves in NYC.

We also have a Waves MBC which has seen use from time to time. Have used it
and Ozone in some mastering work and restorations and that's been helpful.
With some stuff, we wind up liking the Waves EQ and MBC, with other stuff,
Ozone works better.  Sometimes instead it'll be the UA MBC or their Precision
Maximizer. Each seems helpful for different kinds of stuff.

Again, we tend to use such things sparingly, but they sure can be handy
at times.

Another thing we've done every once in a while is to mixdown to a second
system by going out from AA digitally to a TC Finalizer, and/or an Aphex
digital Compellor, and then recording the result on a 2nd machine. With
some long-form programs that has been quite helpful, but of course
those are "patch-ins" as opposed to plug ins!

Waves C4 all the way.   

Waves C4 is my personal favorite as well. They need to do to the C4 like they did to the L3-16 and add way more bands than necessary though.