A Quadrature Power-Summed Compressor Sidechain For "The Uno Compressor"

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plantylife
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Re: A Quadrature Power-Summed Compressor Sidechain For "The Uno Compressor"

Post by plantylife »

Personally, in mixing, I prefer doing thing in steps of -2/3/6dB. Is 3/6/12dB an option?

Autoswitching would be a nice thing.
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mediatechnology
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Re: A Quadrature Power-Summed Compressor Sidechain For "The Uno Compressor"

Post by mediatechnology »

Sure. It's a gain adjustment. Thanks for the feedback.
I suppose the final limitation is will there be enough board space for the added resistors and Phoenix connector pins.
The Waveulator got pretty tight in that area.
Otherwise it's a simple thing to do.

Auto-switching is an interesting idea.
Might be something to add to a future meter board.
Gold
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Re: A Quadrature Power-Summed Compressor Sidechain For "The Uno Compressor"

Post by Gold »

A switchable 5dB and 10db scale would be fine with me. I'd choose the 5dB scale because I rarely use more than a few dB of compression.
emrr
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Re: A Quadrature Power-Summed Compressor Sidechain For "The Uno Compressor"

Post by emrr »

Agree with Gold. I seldom need more than 5dB, and on the Pico's with 10/20 options I've never run them in 20.

If I'm running over 10dB GR, I'm probably looking at the bottom of the range more than the top.

I personally wouldn't find any point to an analog meter with processors like these.
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mediatechnology
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Re: A Quadrature Power-Summed Compressor Sidechain For "The Uno Compressor"

Post by mediatechnology »

emrr wrote: Fri Jun 13, 2025 10:26 am Agree with Gold. I seldom need more than 5dB, and on the Pico's with 10/20 options I've never run them in 20.

If I'm running over 10dB GR, I'm probably looking at the bottom of the range more than the top.

I personally wouldn't find any point to an analog meter with processors like these.
Agreed.
I'm finding that people who use analog GR on the Waveulator wind up using the LED winky for those subtle amounts of GR.
Despite having a peak detector on the analog GR output the mechanical meters are just too slow coming off the stops for small amounts of movement.
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mediatechnology
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Re: A Quadrature Power-Summed Compressor Sidechain For "The Uno Compressor"

Post by mediatechnology »

I've been on an assembled board-building binge, about 11, and I'm about halfway through replacing sold inventory.
Soldering, like mowing the yard, gives me some thinking time.

While thinking about this post I got the idea of adding a summing input to the VCA's current-to-voltage "IV" converter for a Dry Mix input.
This would permit simple parallel compression without much added circuitry.

The line receivers would essentially feed a dual gang pot or stepped switch to adjust the Dry level.
The wiper of the pot would feed an inverting buffer whose output would then sum into the IV stage.
(A signal inversion is required to maintain polarity.)
A Dry Mute button would be good to have.

A reduced functionality approach might be to inject Dry at unity gain and vary Wet level.
The compromise would be that there's no way to trim back overall output level.
Having said that I don't know of anyone using a Wet Dry Mix Add board using that feature.

The Wet level would be controlled by the Makeup gain/attenuation using DC control.

Though not as elegant as a single 4-gang control the cost to implement it far less using a dual control for Dry and a single section for Makeup DC control.

Thoughts?
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Re: A Quadrature Power-Summed Compressor Sidechain For "The Uno Compressor"

Post by Gold »

After using a mechanical meter with the Pico, mostly for looks, I’m over it. I’ll be using an LED meter with this.
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