It's alive!

The Distopik VCA Precision Compressor is the well-known british console bus compressor design revamped and pimped up until we ran out of ideas. At its default settings, it will sound familiar to anyone used to the ubiquitous unit and exceptionally transparent to those used to plugin emulations.

The latter might discover that the hardware unit starts to show its true beauty when pushed hard, holding its own and not "falling apart" even at 10dB+ gain reduction(!) – there’s a reason why the original "Gold can" DBX 202 discrete VCA units are so sought-after!

Then the fun begins with extra features:

• Bass-heavy material that needs to stay this way and just gain some additional thickness and glue? Use the tilt filters or low-cut filters for the sidechain to avoid pumping and only bring out low level details and 3D space.
  
• A hard-panned element in your mix causing the whole mix to duck in an awkward way? Un-link the left and right sidechains completely, or only for a few dB to find the sweetspot between center stability and desired gain reduction transparency.
  
• But if the side-chains can be variably linked... yes, this calls for Mid-Side! MS processing was in fact the inspiration in the first place to do the variable SC-link. Imagine having completely separate controls for mid and side channels - augmenting the kick and snare attack in the centre with slower attack and medium release (there are more timing constants available then on the vintage unit, so you can fine-tune it to source material) and just gently touching the side with low ratio and fast timing constants, to bring out details and reverbs. That alone is powerful, but a link between the two channels of just a couple dBs would provide a combination of uniform stereo "vibe-generating" compression and MS image-shaping ability. How about that?!

All in all, this unit speaks "class" in no uncertain terms and can be operated simply as a normal, well-known bus compressor, or tweaked in an unprecedented detail to achieve results not possible with any other unit. We love it.

The Distopik VCA Precision Compressor is 100% digitally controllable and available for you to take it for a test ride at mixanalog.com for wait for it.........completely free during the app's beta!

The compressor was built exclusively to serve the mixanalog platform, but can be easily expanded into a "retail" model with knobs and a VST control plug-in. The price of the unit would be around 4000$.

About mix:analog beta:
As you might already know, we're running the world-first online service that offers full, real-time control and monitoring of audio hardware over the internet.

Our mission is to harness the best audio processing hardware, hook it up to the internet and make it affordable for everyone by distributing the costs of purchase and maintenance between the users.

It's the one in the middle:



Use the dropdown menu to book it in the mix:analog app:



This is how it looks in the app:



A close-up:

 

Last edited: Aug 30, 2018