Dangerous Music COMPRESSOR, VCA Compressor

Full Description

Breath Life Into Any Track

With the Dangerous Music COMPRESSOR you'll breathe life into any track, taking modern loudness seriously whilst still retaining clarity, and a clear, open sound. The unique and powerful COMPRESSOR puts the punch straight back into your track, and with its simple operation, making a track shine is easy. COMPRESSOR is built using only professional-grade components throughout, resulting in superb transparency without the distortion. Easily alter and control dynamics without drastically changing or colouring the original sound with the COMPRESSOR, ensuring all your low, mid and high frequencies are delivering what they should be.

Unique & Useful Features

On top of its superb transparency and crystal clear compression, the Dangerous Music COMPRESSOR is packed with unique features for enhancing your mixes or masters. The two sidechain EQs can be activated and deactivated with the touch of a button. The bass cut removes anything below 60Hz so the compressor doesn't react to that low-end content that eats up your headroom. This can provide your mix with a tighter and cleaner low end by ignoring infrasonic frequencies or bottom-end from a kick drum or bass guitar. By engaging the sibilance boost it will stop the harsh sibilance sounds from a vocal or brash cymbals. This uses the same ultra-linear high-end shelf from the BAX EQ, allowing you to push higher frequencies without the harsh sounds being boosted. The COMPRESSOR will dynamically attenuate sibilance and any other high-end spikes, which will brighten your mix without bringing up the harsh sounds you don't want. The COMPRESSOR also features two independent RMS detectors that allow it to deliver crystal clear and solid stereo imaging when processing a mix or master. With true stereo linking, the COMPRESSOR can operate in both dual mono and stereo mode whilst still tracking gain reduction identically across both channels. With dual mono mode you have two completely independent signal paths, allowing yo to run a kick on one and a bass on the other. You can also 'cascade' the two channels into each other for compression with peak limiting, allowing you to easily ride a vocal, spiky instrument or anywhere you need powerful and transparent control.

SmartDyn & Auto Attack/Release

The COMPRESSOR is packed with useful features that gets you great results quickly. SmartDyn helps address the level issue in a really great way. It uses two independent slopes that work together, one for catching peaks and one for average levels, allowing you to control fast transient peaks without causing average volume levels to drop. This stops the pumping artifacts that usually occurs when fully pushing sounds towards today's loudness wars, letting you maintain higher average volume levels. COMPRESSOR also features automatic attack and release settings. This allows you to dial in your adjustments simply by turning the threshold and make-up gain knobs. When auto attack and release is active, the attack and release knobs do nothing. Additionally, you can delve in deeper and make precise adjustments manually for the attack and release.

Highly Versatile

The COMPRESSOR is easy to use yet delivers powerful results. It can handle a wide range of tasks often left to automation and EQ during tracking, mixing and mastering. Vocal level rides can be easily smoothed out just like a trusted engineer riding a fader. The internal sidechain EQ curves let you tame vocal sibilance or let bass punch through untouched, or both simultaneously.

True A/B Comparisons

The COMPRESSOR ensures you are always making confident and true A/B comparisons between your unprocessed and processing audio. It features a true hard-wired bypass that completely removes all the circuitry of the unit so you can compare in confidence without colouration, latency or disruptive noises. Thanks to the dual VU meters, you can easily see your gain reduction, input or output levels. VUs usually can't show you the fast transient leaps past threshold, but that's where the dual LED meters come in. You can view the input, output or gain reduction on the VU meters and catch the sudden spikes or single transient crossing over the threshold with the LED meters.

Reviews

"This compressor is very easy to use and performs superbly, controlling the dynamics in an extremely transparent but effective manner. Impressive." Sound On Sound

Read the full review here.

Features

• Elegant, easy-to-use design with an uncompromising audio circuit by Chris Muth
• Unique Smart Dynamics dual-slope detector handles transient peaks without ducking the average level
• Auto attack/release – achieve excellent results with just the threshold and makeup gain settings
• 2 audiophile-grade internal sidechain EQ settings
• Hard and soft knee slope selection
• External sidechain routing
• Audiophile-grade VCAs for controlling levels without artifacts
• Stepped ratio settings from 1:1 to 20:1
• Multiple metre modes

Specifications

• Frequency Response: +-0.25dB from 15Hz to 80kHz
• Maximum Level: > +27dBu
• Noise Floor: < -93dBu band limited from 22Hz – 22kHz
• THD+N: < 0.005 percent
• IMD: < 0.007 percent
• Crosstalk Rejection: > 115dB @ 1kHz
• Input Impedance: 20K ohms
• Output Impedance: 50 omhs
• Side Chain Filters: Bass cut is 6dB/octave, -3dB at 60Hz / sibilance boost corner frequency is 1kHz with +2dB at 5kHz shelving