[BC] Are they all this way? (crunchy Compellor)

[Kevin Tekel]

Despite the flowery claims, I can sure hear my Aphex Compellor working.
It's the original Model 300, and with the process controls in the
suggested vertical position, there's way too much compression going on.  I
really only want some decent levelling to put ahead of a CRL Spectral
Energy Compressor, but with the controls all the way towards the "Level"
position, it rides up the gain too much and crashes into crescendos with a
painfully slow attack time.

With the knob halfway between those two settings, the gain control is
smoothened out and makes a pretty decent AGC, but the sound is still too
processed for my taste, especially to go in front of a multiband
compressor.  Even on dynamically flat recordings, it shows a steady
compression of 2 to 4 dB above the levelling, crunching away at the audio
and throwing transients into its "just in case" limiter for no good
reason.

My question is, are they all this way, or can this lackluster performance
be improved by a recapping and recalibration?  I'd do that anyway, but I
don't have the manual (nor is one available for download from Aphex), and
for now I've put it aside in favor of a CRL SGC-800 which is doing the
same job much more transparently.




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