What effects the sound of a compressor?
It’s really amazing how many things effect the sound of a compressor, how many different parts of the circuit make a compressor sound like it does. From component choice to board layout to timing to compressor circuitry to output device, they all work together to make a compressor sound just the way it does. A few points really stand out. Number one is probably the timing of the compressor circuit. How you control the timing of how fast the unit reacts and how it reacts in the side chain is of primary importance. A ‘text-book’ compressor has a very predictable scale, a linear ratio that simply compresses a signal in a very straightforward fashion. How we have designed our compressors is actually much more complex than that. If you notice on the DCL-200 for example, you see that the timing doesn’t say “0.01mS” as the fastest attack time, or “2S” as the slowest release time, they are just simply written on a scale from 1-10. And there is no “ratio” control, there is something called “slo
