Originally posted by pangea
...isn't it so that some amount of compression on the voice will add to that nearness and airiness on the voice?...
Hey, Roland...

Not if I've understood your question. Comp/limiters are used to reduce the dynamic range of the signal. Compressors in-particular, in simplistic sense, raise the quiet pasages and reduce the loud passages. This can be useful for singers with either poor mic etiquette (they wander out of the pattern) or with weak vocal support. You can boost their weak parts, but then, when they "get it right" and are both breathing properly AND are on-axis, their suddenly increased signal is constrained to avoid clipping. Doing this without a compressor (and not "riding the faders"...) you might have boosted the fader to catch the faint parts and then gotten blasted (with feedback) when they "got it right".

A limiter can be used alone, to merely cap the extreme output of say, a bass guitar (which often clip in hard-driven passages, but are otherwise not needing support for the soft passages).

Make sense?

What you may be referring to are effects - or signal processors such as reverb, delay, echo etc., which add presence or the perception the singer is in a large public bath somewhere...