Shadow Hills Industries Mastering Compressor

Shadow Hills Industries Mastering Compressor

The Shadow Hills Mastering Compressor has extraordinary functionality, and also provides mastering grade compression and limiting for tracking and mixing. Essentially it is two compressors in series, per channel, that can act in stereo, or dual mono. First comes our mastering grade electro optical compressor, followed by our discrete Class-A compressor/limiter. Both feed our switchable custom output transformers, Nickel, Iron, and Steel. There is enough gain in each section to overdrive the hottest tape, or clip your converters, if you're into that sort of thing.

The input stage is transformer balanced, followed by our fully discrete optical compressor. This section utilizes the same T4B optical attenuator as the LA2A and LA3A, but is optimized for mastering. The second stage is our discrete Class-A VCA compressor. There are no electrolytic caps or IC chips in the audio path. There are six ratios: 1.2 to 1, 2 to 1, 3 to 1, 4 to 1, 6 to 1, and 10 to 1. There is six attack settings: .1, .5, 1, 5, 10, and 30 milliseconds. And there are six release times selectable: .1, .25, .5,8, 1.2, and Auto. There is an insertable filter in the side chain to limit pumping with bass heavy material. Lastly the signal goes through our new Shadow Hills custom transformer-switching network.

The first position is Nickel, which is our custom version of a famous L. A. custom console. Next is Iron. In this mode the signal goes through our op-amp and into a Class-A output stage then to our custom Iron transformers, the last transformer position is Steel. These selections allow you to choose between different output transformers that are in effect: clean, colored, and dirty, respectively.