BlackAsh SC-5 80s All-American Compressor

Precision modeled after the "black" version of a sought-after classic VCA compressor, the SC-5 opens up a world of versatility: You're opting for super compression smooth to smooth the signal on your masterbuss? Are you looking for a colorful or squished sound on your drum bus? Do you want to tame lively and dynamic material? The BlackAsh SC-5 takes care of it all. Compared to its brother, the BlueAsh SC-5, the BlackAsh SC-5 features slightly different compression behavior, a different harmonic structure paired with a darker sounding audio path and the option to feed external signals from the sidechain.

FEATURES

EXTERNAL SIDE CURRENT INPUT

The BlackAsh SC-5 adds an external side input that can be activated by pressing the “Ext SC” button. The BlackAsh SC-5 is a feedback compressor design, so feeding an external sidechain input into the existing feed-back loop circuit would result in a feed-forward topology, which would result in different compression behavior. To overcome this problem, the external side input is treated in the same way as the normal audio signal, while the resulting control voltage is fed into a VCA mirror that modulates the audio signal. In this way, the feedback operation can be retained in both normal and external side chain modes.

AUTOMATIC GAIN COMPENSATION

The BlackAsh SC -5 is a fixed limit compressor: more compression can be obtained by increasing the input gain. Of course this will increase the volume of your signal. Drag the input gain knob while holding the right mouse button and the output gain will be adjusted so that the perceived output level remains approximately the same.

AUTHENTIC CIRCUIT EMULATION

Our real-time SPICE-like component-based circuit simulation approach allows you to authentically capture the sound and feel of the analog counterpart in every nuance. Every crucial part of the circuit, including the custom VCA design, dual time constant detector circuit, feedback compressor loop, and audio path has been faithfully modeled.

OPTIMIZED SSE2 CODE

DSP operations are aligned using the SSE2 instruction set. This ensures the highest possible performance operation despite very complex calculations.

SUPERAMPLING SELF-TUNED FOR MAXIMUM AUDIO TRANSPARENCY

Os Aliasing artifacts are effectively attenuated using a low latency linear phase Dolph-Chebyshev polyphase design. Oversampling is automatically adjusted to your session's sampling rate to save valuable CPU power while providing the most transparent sound possible.

HIGHDPI / RETINA SUPPORT

All our plugins support high pixel density on Mac OSX and Windows to give you the most pleasant user experience on high DPI monitors. Consult your manual to find out if your DAW supports HighDPI if you are working on Windows.

Minimum System Requirements (MAC)

Minimum System Requirements  (WINDOWS)

SSE2 compatible processor (Intel Core CPU recommended)
1GB RAM
Windows 7 or later
VST or AAX compatible host
Display resolution 1280x1024 pixels or more