[scarecrowbob]

I work with audio professionally and it took me a years to get a feel for dynamics processing. Like, it wasn't until I down sat with a nice compressor (in my case a Neve 453) and just did a lot of experiments, and then took my experiences from those experiments to my live gigs.

IME, you can get a feel for what the threshold and ratio are doing pretty quickly, and that's probably enough to be useful. In broad strokes that's all you need to make them "work". If you have the attack set way fast, you'll start to hear the signal get a bit muddy.

But attack and release (especially on a lot of plugins) are a bit funky, and I still can't tell what the knee is doing unless I move the knob around. And I own a couple clones (76kt or gold comp 2a) and a couple of distressors, and they sound different but I still need play around with them to coax them into what I think they should sound like.