Qucik Thanks to Plug In Dan For Stressing TDR MOLOT GE

Added chime in: thank you to Dan in general for passing along so much info on digital compression side chains and their relationship to oversampling and “true” fast attack and release times, I’ve been through many a digital compressor (and EQ) and wondered why my audio keeps coming out a mess at the end of most of them, especially with regard to “ice picks”. I’ve had Kotelnikov GE for 3-4 years and I’ve only used it once for general, non-bus compression (on a vocal, I've used it more often for gentle bus compression), but in that case it was able to grab peaks that other compressors kept missing and/or pumping. Now I have a better idea why.

Yes, Dan has a passion for good sounding plugins and comes at it from a techinial point of view which i like. I don't remember the side chaining discussion. Could you point me in the correct directions? 

Compressors are just devices that constantly modulate the signal based off of a rectified, clipped, and filtered copy of the signal. The basic theoretical stuff hasn't changed that much since the 50s and 60s. We just have some much better designs now and technology capable of doing it logarithmic in VCAs and then digital which took away the VCA noise and distortion.

Rectified means DC instead of AC, all up instead of up and down. In digital this is absolute value of the sample. Unfortunately digital is limited by the Nyquist frequency and thus the sidechain is broken from the very start in most digital compressors. abs(the sample) does not work for obvious reasons. Think about it. The square root of the sample squared will distort. The 44.1/48khz compressor are starting to go wrong with just the samples. And the samples are not the sinc functions that compromise the signal. How could it work well?
Oh and this produced odd order harmonics only. Even is produced by half wave rectifiers or mixed, which won't lead to as effective control. So the cool dirt box affect of many analog compressors already inhibits their control versus devices that add the dirt with input or makeup gain. MOLOT GE does this well where it is dirty input gain, dirty makeup gain, and a saturator, and clean makeup.

The threshold is a clipper. The harder the knee, the more distortion in digital.

Then attack and release are just coefficients of a low pass filter being switched between. You're going to need a high sample rate for this, especially for something like fast attack to slow release like Fairchild, 1176, and SSL bus.

Oh and even if you make it clean enough (a challenge in both analog and digital) it will still sound like shit because modulating the signal like that will wreck things as everyone with a cheap VCA compressor has found out using them on tracks not made by drum machines or locked to the grid in a daw. Now you're really changing the "time" of the audio signal as Jack Joseph Puig claimed good compressors do (they have multiple releases with charge times, feedback, and other dependencies to prevent you from truly doing this) and it will sound like shit because you're mangling everything.

The original solution to this was multiple release constants and feedback. So the compressor that splits and modulates the signal also modulates it's own modulator. And this turns out to be equivalent to a feedforward compressor tying the filter coefficients to input level but Rein Narma couldn't have known or built that on a kitchen table in the 50s. www.aes.org/e-lib/browse.cfm?elib=12380

So these are all pretty much crazy complex stuff and the Waves CLA Comps are worse control devices than the ancient Bomb Factory plugs that come with Pro Tools. There's not a lot of compressors that run at 44.1 khz the whole way through and sound good. Waves Ren Comp and Oxford Dynamics are about it but they can be imposing on the signal like an even worse version of the cheap VCA comp. They also don't do anything above 1 and 4 khz respectively. They sound good tonally by simply not doing anything and having program dependent holds. Even the aliasing warmth function on the Oxford Dyanmics can sound good on bass with huge aliasing and like under 5% on a snare.

Then you have the ones that run at 192 khz or so that can sound okay but you can break them like the UAD and Fuse comps. Fuse models stuff that is designed to be broken though and what he claims to have modeled, the compressors pretty much do. The VCL-25 oscillates like crazy, the VCL-373 pumps like hell. Then ones with more program dependency like Presswerk where you can just use lookahead and adaptive release to make it not break but it's still very imposing compared to Molot GE in feedback mode or Kotelnikov GE.

And with analog, the late 80s onward designs tend to be really fucking good. GML, Aphex, Daking, Drawmer, Crane Song, etc. They're much better at controlling the signal than an 1176, LA2A, DBX 160, and SSL bus comp. THey just don't have the signature sound. But a lot of stuff never worked on anything resembling those compressors and you had to peak limit/clip/saturate it and fader ride it manually. Now you can shove a vocal or weird drum into kotelnikov GE and it will level it. You can even out a performance really well with modern analog too. Chop the peaks off without splatting it forward like an 1176 or chopping into the body like a bad vca comp or old digital.

And the plugin world is full of junk. Why the hell should you have to choose the program dependencies of a compressor meticulously? It's supposed to modulate the signal for you in a positive way with the turn of a couple knobs, saving you time. Compassion and Unisum are some sick joke. Meanwhile the SSL Bus has an "AUTO" button and Presswork as an "ADAPT" knob. And they sound better and do more 90% of the time. Kotelnikov GE is all under the hood. You choose the threshold for the RMS, the peak threshold above that, attack of the peak, play around with the releases a bit, and IT ALWAYS SOUNDS GOOD AND PROGRESSES YOU FURTHER by squishing stuff. There is no futzing and fidgeting to make it not sound like a clipper like Arousor or trying to not make it pump up breaths like an LA2A, distort like LA3A, or fuzz out like LA4 or sound irradiated like a Blue Stripe 1176 or a Distressor. The irradiation is optional and tied to the sidechain being only halfwave at certain frequencies. they copied that from the Crane Song STC 8.

Screw cloning, steal the coolest features of everything good and make something that does their job better. Kotelnikov took from the GML 8900, Weiss DS-1, Waves Renaissance Compressor, and Crane Song STC-8 and they gave it away for free. And let you pay to get working fast attack for peak portion and more features/cool distortion. The Drawmer 1978 stole not just from the 1178 but from the Orban stuff, API 2500, Compex, and their own 1968 to be a super cool drum bus controller. Yet people would still rather get two Behringer or Warm products instead. 
The ART limiter and Aphex 651 are great too for less than the cost of a KT 76. They do what even the real thing can't. The TDR Bundle is 200 Euros. Puts almost all cheap or old hardware and every UAD compressor to shame.

Another shout-out to Dan for not only the good ears for recommending plugs, but the technical dets to back it up.
If nothing else his posts led me to Fuse, fantastic compliments to the TDR stuff of which I was already a big fan.

Have you analized the slate compressors?

RTFM

I used the Molot GE more today and mh yes after my first WoW it's not my friend for lead vocals.
But it likes percussion and drums a lot.

For LV it's still my HW 1176s or the SW equivalents by PA and LogicX.
BTW when you set the LogiX 1176 by ear, and you ignore the stupid GR meter, toying around with the output saturation, it's very close to what I expect...

We are truly spoiled with tools....

He’s incorrect about the dual stage. It’s just a controllable dual release. Secondary attack time is the charge time for the secondary release. Attack mix bleeds that charge time into the main attack rate, changing the shape of the curve, which the alpha-sigma knob is already doing. It’s not two stages of compression at once or in a row, just crazy filters.