A brand new VCA-based, mixing compressor for eurorack.
Compressor-1 is the first compressor design at Tenderfoot Electronics, and offers a whole load of features you'll be familiar with from your DAW compressor, and then some.
With its knee control, optional 5V(0dB) soft clipping, and switchable topologies, Compressor-1 can take you from very subtle effects right the way up to the most extreme squashing, limiting, and beyond!
The 3 separate inputs are AC-coupled and mix down into a mono compression channel for processing. This works especially well for compressing drum tracks or for using side-chain compression on multiple melodic tracks.
The sidechain input is super easy to use, and patching into it interrupts the normalling of the 3 audio inputs to the envelope follower of the compressor. To save an external mult in your case, the signal you patch into the side-chain input is duplicated at the "Thru" output, allowing you to patch that straight into your audio mixer if needed. This, along with the wide range of controls allows you to achieve fantastic ducking with minimal effort.
The knee control, often seen in software but less often on hardware compressors, will be a familiar control to many, and quickly allows you to take your subtle compression and ramp it up into harsher limiting, and vice versa.
One of the more unique features of compressor-1 is the topology switch. This allows you to switch the audio envelope follower of the compression circuit from after the VCA (down position), which products more natural, self-limiting compression, to before the VCA (up position) where it directly follows the raw input levels. In the up position, the controls gain even more sensitivity and can push beyond the typical levels of compression and limiting, and into the realms of the ridiculous.
The attack and release controls have a wide range from 0.1ms to over 1.5 seconds, with a small amount of self-oscillation when both controls are set to their fastest settings. With a couple of patch cables, this allows you to use compressor-1 as a no-input sound source for noise lovers out there.
Manual and video to come!