Even with extreme settings, the regular renoise compressor is not behaving properly compared to what is expected. Even though the meter is reading massive amounts of gain reduction, the signal is barely affected. The video goes into some detail and compares to several different compressors with A/B tests against the dry signal.
Yeah the meters in the compressor are quite weird. I used to be overly anal about this kind of stuff when I first switched to Renoise but after a while I just got used to ignoring the meters/values and use my ears only. So it was kind of helpful for me actually 
Your demonstration shows quite a lot of good points.
I miss one test in your video demonstration:
The bus compressor also allows you to change the knee setting to influence larger or lesser parts of the signal. Have you tried playing with that as well?
I just noticed that you have different makeup settings:
Compressor: +0.5 dB
Bus Compressor: +16 dB (!)
Recomp (Wet Output): +5dB
jsAudio (Gain): +5.98 dB
Vanilla: +5 dB
That could explain why they sound so different…
EDIT:…and the last 3 sound similiar because their makeup settings are too! 
/>
I deliberately kept the knee settings off, to give the most direct and obvious compression effect. Knee settings would soften the attack of the compressor and make things more transparent.
As explained in the video, I used Voxengo SPAN to match the input and output levels of the compressor. The difference between the output gains of the Renoise compressor is to match the levels of the uncompressed signal going in, nothing more. The output gain would also not affect the timbre of the sound, and you can hear very obvious heavy compression effects on the three freeware VSTs.
Mmmkay, I may have been wrong on the other plugins, but makeup is not output gain, it’s an overall “boost” of the input signal before it hits the compressor. So for the native compressors I’m pretty sure that it makes a huge difference… 
Makeup gain is a volume boost that is applied to the final output of the compressor. As its name implies, it is used to “make up” any gain lost during the compression process. It does not alter the input in any way, nor does it affect the characteristics of the compressor.
http://tutorials.renoise.com/wiki/Audio_Effects#Dynamics_Devices
D’oh! 
I was so sure about that…sorry! So please ignore the previous posts - because bullshit. 
Actually I think this is a very good topic.
I also noticed you had different makeup settings.
Personally I have always found the native renoise compressors more subtle with their own flavour, and I actually prefer that. But thats just personal preference and may not be good for someone looking for a specific representation of a compressor.
just my 2 cents worth…
Just judging by this video, you have a great speaking voice. Very soothing to me.
I’ve been aware that the Renoise compressors were slightly different in settings than other compressors. But all compressors have their own sound and flavor, so I think it’s a little odd to say that the Renoise compressors don’t “work correctly”.
Brainpalace has right.!!!
makeup needs to be equal output level, thats the point of the test, you need to hear the sem ouput level, withoput any other dsp.
mentioned in th video… 
i test with UAD compressors too, i get the same problem…
and yes the gain reduction meters is fail to…
Mmh, just stumbled upon this topic again. Can we have this fixed for 3.0 final?
Apparently not… 
Has it been decided that this behaviour is a fault or characteristic?
The behavior and characteristic of the DSP is by design and not necessarily meant to replace compressors that have different characteristics regardless if their performance is better or worse.
And the fact that the meters indicate heavy compression while the actual compression is rather subtle is also by design?
It depends on the ratio, i’m not sure how you experience the compressor, but when i look at if the compressor is following the threshold if i set the ratio to limit mode, it just seems to do it fairly well, it just seems to reserve a little peak overhead…
I’m not sure if you want to fully decapitate all your peaksignals at the threshold line, but you can still pull that out of vision to make them disappear into the void.
But to be honest:I hardly use compressors unless i have some very spiky samples around, but majority of samples can simply do with good EQ and mixing.
at the beginning of renoise use i use lot of compression to accentuate the db, but now since few month, i didn’t use compression so often indeed i’ve read from a forum sound engineer that the sound did’nt need always compression and a good eq do quasi always the work after this a personnal opinion but !!!
Well, I use compression mainly for drums (parallel compression). The Renoise compressors always indicate extreme compression, but the audible effects are not that extreme actually. Actually, I cannot even make the native compressors to compress as hard as one would like it for parallel compression. And indeed, compared to other compressors, the correlation between the meters and the audible effects just seems off.