2013

Effects and effect plug-ins 139
It's the same story with deep bass. On closer listening, you'll find that with strong
compression, the signal still retains its power, which would otherwise be lost if the
envelope were to follow shortly afterwards.
"Vintage" mode has another feature: the output of the compressor in the signal flow
features an emulation of a transformer-coupled matching-level amplifier. This
contributes to some subtle, non-linear distortions at high levels, but is very much
frequency-dependent.
VCA Mode
In VCA mode, the parameter selection and the circuitry design
correspond to a modern compressor with a VCA element as the
control circuit and a forward automatic gain control in the
detector section ("feed-forward design", i.e. the controlling
signal for level reduction is taken from the input signal).
The typical basic sound for this category is accurate, largely neutral and, in relation to
the adjustable parameters, easily predictable.
In VCA mode, the control signal is accessed at the input where it firstly executes a
controllable low-cut (which may be set up via "detector hp freq" in "Expert" mode).
The filter makes sure that deep-frequency signals have less influence on the
adjustment settings; this is a popular trick for more power, e.g., when using drums in a
sub-group.
The filtered signal then arrives at the detector. With the forward gain control,
previously set parameters apply fully and affect the adjustment settings immediately.
In contrast to this, there is a "feedback" method which provides a second compressor
mode.