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Hi I'm Dave Derr, the president of Empirical Labs. We're going to be giving you a little
demo today of some of our products. For those of you who don't make the AES shows you'll
get to see a little bit of the demos that we do with those. And I'd also like to thank
Kooster McAllister at Record Plant Remote. We're here in his beautiful truck and it's
always a pleasure to work with Kooster. He's an old friend of ours and one of our first
users around the area and we really appreciate him letting us use his facility here. What
I have here is the Distressor, the first product that we made. The Distressor was originally
conceived back when I got my first vintage compressors. I was an engineer at Eventide
back in- starting about '87 and I had a little recording studio that gradually grew into
a bigger recording studio and having been a musician for many years in the past, I'd
been exposed to a lot of vintage gear. I always kept thinking, I remember these compressors
having a certain sound and in order to get those compressors, this is back around 1990,
and at that point they were vintage and very expensive. I was finally able to save up and
buy a few and immediately I realized that my impressions were right and the old compressors
had a real sound and character which is really vacant on a lot of the new gear out there.
It's strange that many years we tried to get more and more accurate gear and with the coming
of the digital age, of course, we got very accurate but very quickly it became apparent
that maybe this isn't the most pleasing thing. I had my first tape deck; professional tape
deck I got was an old M56 16 track 2 inch analog. When I started recording on that it
was unbelievable, the low end that I got off of that, I recorded a lot at 15IPS. And when
I got my first digital recorder it was immediately obvious that there was something not as fun
sounding, everything took more work to get the sound full and natural. I don't know if
natural is the right term but it definitely was more of a fight and I still had my old
16 track so, along with scopes and distortion analyzers, I spent a good deal of time listening
and looking at the signals. Certain things become apparent, both measurably and audibly.
The old 16 track, first of all, had a lot of low frequency distortion, it wasn't apparent
as distortion but it showed up as harmonics that made things more apparently bassier.
Also the high-end, the saturation of the high frequencies caused by a combination of the
bias frequency and high frequencies self erasing themselves, made the high end much smoother
and warmer. Warm is a very popular phrase now-a-days but it's a real effect with analog
tape decks, it's a combination of the high frequency softness combined with low frequency
distortion and modulation which makes low frequencies more apparent and the high frequencies
a little more pleasing to your ear. So anyway, when I started thinking about a product to
do, the first thing that became apparent was in the compressors. EQ's; there's a lot of
subtle differences. The compressors, to me, were night and day between the old vintage
units and the newer VCA based models. So I spent some time investigating the older units
and found that they used non-linear gain elements, meaning you add a volt to the control voltage
and you have a 10 dB gain and then another volt and then a 10 dB gain. That's not the
way the older units worked and so I immediately went that route because it looked like an
easier way to achieve what I wanted and along the way I found I could do a number of things.
First of all I could make the units reproducible from one to the other and second of all, by
using digital circuitry in the Distressor, instead of a ratio ***, I have a stepped
ratio control and that not only goes through the ratios in a traditional matter but in
4 cases it actually switches it in and out different circuitry. And what I did was try
to emulate using various test tones of my ear, some of the older devices. The 1176 was
one of my favorites and the first to go after. Then I went after the LA-2A and then I went
after a Fairchild 670, which later I found out, was one that was pretty far out of calibration.
And finally I emulated a couple of the Neve, which were really classics and were very fast
and smooth which incidentally ended up using non-linear gain elements also. But anyway,
by combining a bunch of modern techniques with old techniques we came up with the Distressor
and that's basically, the outcome we were looking for was to get the old sound with
reproducibility and a lot of versatility and a lot of control added back to the user in
a modern box. Anyway, hope you enjoy the demo here.