I know that a lot of people are turned off by the cheaper stuff, but I love my Rocktron Big Crush. I got it for $30.00 new, and I hear very little, if any, sound coloration at all from it. The compressor really did wonders - I now use the crunch channel versus tite gain because I know get adequate sustain and more balls from it.
At the same time I got the Rocktron, I picked up a Boss DS-1, mainly for nostalgia purposes. I was going to bring it back because the nostalgia wore off pretty quickly, but then I read in a Neal Schon forum that he used the pedal as a boost with the tone and gain at zero and the level about maxed. I started using this in front of the crunch channel with the gain on the amp maxed combined with the Big Crush, and the results are awesome! Using my Les Paul, I can pretty much nail Schon's tone from the Journey Escape album.
I have had my Ace since 2007, and have invariably gone back to my old Tite Gain settings any time I make a change. This is the first time that I found a tone I am happier with.
The 2 downsides to the Compressor are that I don't like the way the clean channel sounds with it (but I don't use clean much anyway) and I had to get a noise suppressor, but the noise gate actually improved my tone even more - I actually should have had it all along
The moral to my rant is that for $70.00 I got two pedals and a tone that I love