Heritage Audio has announced the Successor Stereo Bus Compressor promising ‘the missing link between your separate tracks and a full and round-sounding hit, allowing vocals to shine through without muddying the backing track’. Where traditional bus compression is been taken care of by VCA-style devices based on ICs (integrated circuits), the Successor Stereo Bus Compressor uses discrete class-A circuitry with chunky transformers and diode bridge-based gain reduction.
Using Carnhill transformer-coupled balanced inputs and outputs for added character and vintage vibe, Heritage Audio’s new compressor is a true stereo diode bridge-based bus compressor with advanced sidechain filtering and built-in parallel processing capabilities, sharing the same class-A 73-type output stage that the Spanish company is noted for.
Diode bridge-based bus compression creates second-order harmonic distortion characteristics associated with ‘vintage tone’, while eliminating odd harmonic content. Ultra-fast attack and release control times that are not present in vintage designs allow for far more flexible settings, such as FET-like sounds and volume maximising without transient artefacts.
Complex sidechain filtering options, which work with already commonplace high-pass filters to introduce mid-band peak filters and high-frequency compression to allow bus correction that was not previously possible – allowing users to tailor mixes in ways not previously possible. Sidechain L and Sidechain R send and return connections allow external sidechain signals or further external processing of the internal one, and a Blend control (with dedicated On/Off button allowing instant comparison between wet and dry signals) provides parallel compression with no external equipment required. Ttrue stereo operation on single controls with matched gain cells gives extremely precise left/right tracking and almost zero offset between channels – compression tracking works in Oxford mode, meaning that the highest signal takes over compression as opposed to summing the LR channels.
The Successor Stereo Bus Compressor will be available by the end of Q1 2019 with an MSRP of €1,299 (excluding VAT) and MAP of US$1,499.
