I had been meaning to practice what I preach, and pick up a set of compressors for a while now for at home. I figure I’m normally pretty conservative in my levels while tracking, gain structure, etc… so up until now having some really wasn’t a massive concern, or in the budget. But the other week I put some stuff up on Gearslutz, one of my favorite g
ear/engineering forums, to sell or trade. Someone offered to trade a pair of FMR RNCs + Funklogic rack for my Lexicon MPX-1 that I had up for sale. Seemed pretty fair of a deal, since each of us were getting rid of something that was worth around $400, so I did it.
I got this nice set in the mail on Monday, and took them home and racked them up. I put one pair as inserts on channels 1/2 on my Mackie 400F for tracking, and the second set on channels 7/8 in a loop, so that I can use them with Logic Pro for content that needs extra compression (or as a bus compressor).
I haven’t had time to mess with it as a bus compressor yet, but so far for the inserts I’m very happy. I tried it out with my voice (using an AT-4060 mic), my Machinedrum, and my Moog Voyager.
My thoughts so far: It’s killer on voice. Really helps keeps things in control. It’s a VERY fast compressor. Fast like an 1176. The Super-Nice mode really is, super nice. It’s a bit slower on the release, but it makes it so that you only hear ‘louder’ but not ‘compression’. It’s a quiet unit too. The Moog doesn’t need much transparent compressions most of the time, since I don’t have most of my patches responding to velocity anyways. It does help to keep it in check however when making new sounds and preventing you from clipping out the track or blowing out the speakers. With the Machinedrum I’ve only gotten to use it only for the entire track, and it was nice to help gel things together.
This is a very clean compressor, with almost no character. Its downsides that I can see are not enough metering, no ability on the front to switch in and out the sidechain (a simple mod could fix that), cheapish pots, wallwarts for power supplies, and it doesn’t work all that great on bass for many settings. Its ok on bass, but I’ve used much better. They are unbalanced, but as an insert I don’t care… and if I really need to balance them then that’s just some simple transformers and wire and its done. No biggie.
In case anyone is reading this and thinking, “WTF is he talking about”, I’m talking about a hardware compressor. What’s a compressor? It’s a unit that helps level out the dynamics in audio. Basically it makes the quiet things louder and the louder things a bit softer. It sounds good.
These guys sell for ust $180 or so new. Killer deal. Unfortunately, now I was to get a pair of compressors with a little more character, and a better preamp with more dirt to it also… oh what have I done?
