This compressor has been designed primarily to create natural-sounding sustain for the electric guitar without sacrificing its brightly percussive character. However, it appears to apply well to a variety of other sound sources, and with CompressX2 a stereo version is available as well.

To be able produce strong compression and still maintain a natural sound, the design catches (attack-phase) power spikes with a soft saturation circuit, converting them into additional harmonic content and enforcing a strict limit on the output level. Saturating operation is the default setting of the mode control. Three anti-aliasing options are available, 2x oversampling with 32-tap filters and 4x with 64 and 128 taps.

The measure control select which indicator of loudness to base calculations on: peak – instantaneous amplitude – measurement allows the unit to react very quickly, while rms – root mean square power – is of a gentler kind.

Compression amount is controlled through the strength knob, from 0 effectively disabling the effect, up to a maximum ratio of 16:1. The attack and release controls map higher values to slower reactions.

Features:
Modeled by CAPS

Credit: Tim Goetze