There are a few revered compressors used in studios. Many of these are the old valve (vacuum tube) units that used an optical element for the compression. These compressors were easy to dial in, and no matter what setting you put the controls at, they never sounded bad, interesting, but never bad.

We here at Mozztronics set ourselves the task of taking the essence of these old vacuum tube compressors, and coming up with a solid state circuit that captured how these old compressors sounded. We had to use an optical element for the compression, the compressor had to be useful for both guitar and bass, and we had to be different from what is already on the market

We think we did it (yay) !

We considered the units with only a few controls, and in the end decided to go with the full range of compressor controls (don’t worry, this is very easy to dial in).

GAIN is the make up gain so you can adjust for the same volume from bypass to effect active, RATIO controls the amount of compression from barely on to super squishy, THReshold adjusts the point at which the compressor starts to operate, ATTack controls the speed at which the compression starts to operate, so as to let through initial dynamics & keep sparkle in the sound (min attack time is anti clockwise), RELease controls the speed at which the compression stops operating (minimum release time is anticlockwise).

But wait, there is a switch and an extra control. You betcha !
The RANGE switch selects the frequency range the compressor sensing uses for its operation. Up is full range. Try both positions to see which works best for your playing and your instrument. DYNamics uses an old studio trick of “parallel compression”, by mixing in a little of the raw uncompressed signal to add back some dynamics, you still get the compression, but keep expression and feeling.
We also added some tricky internal circuits around the release control, we call it “interactive release” and while you can set the release with the potentiometer, we have an internal added release that works in parallel and varies depending on the input signal.