WMD - Compressor

The growth of drum voices in the Eurorack world and tendency to make music entirely with a modular system can have the disadvantage of differences in dynamics. A compressor can help you to minimize those but you can also use it as a creative part of your patch-

he WMD Compressor module offers a lot of option like Hard- and Soft-Knee compression, a side-chain input, dry/wet control for parallel compression and in first line voltage control of some important parameters. It has been designed around the THAT 4301 core, a high end dynamics processor with low noise.

The signal flow of the WMD compressor is pretty easy: the sound passes an input gain stage, then the compressor VCA and finally the output gain stage

The manual Attack- and Release times can be extremely short what gives you the possibility to use the envelope as an effect; by CV you can even stop compression. If the times are too short the compressor might distort as the follower rather follows the audio signal, not the envelope. Via the side chain input you can use another audio signal to control the input signal´s compression... to duck a bass sound by the bassdrum etc. At the input and at the output there are saturation stages that sound a little different.

• Attack time: 60 uS to 6s (secnds per dB).
• Release: 2uS to 3.6s (seconds per dB).
• Ratio: from 1:1 bto infinite:1
• Makeup Gain from -36dB to 36dB.
• Input Gain: -12dB to 12dB.
• Threshold from -14dBu to 24dBu

Voltage control of Attack and Release times, Threshold and Makeup Gain is possible. Attack/Release time can be controled automatically or manually. Hard- or Soft-Knee-Kompression is selectable.

By an audio cable at the back you can chain two compressor modules for processing stereo signals. The manual setting have to be the same for both modules, though.