ab Compressor | Limiter X

What it does

A compressor and limiter that splits the signal into three poles, left, right and front, each with its own threshold, attack, release, ratio, knee, makeup gain, saturation and bypass. The poles start linked, so it behaves as one stereo compressor until you unlink them. Detection switches between peak and RMS, lookahead offers 0, 5 or 10 milliseconds, ratio runs from 1:1 to 99:1 or infinite for limiting, and a dry wet dial allows parallel processing. Gain reduction, wet and dry traces can each be shown or hidden.

In the demo

Jade runs it in AUM over a wide stereo dance track, first linked across the whole mix, then unlinked so the middle is compressed hard while left and right take lighter settings and their own saturation. She adds drums and repeats the split.

Worth knowing

It saves no presets of its own, so settings travel only in the host session, and Jade had to ask the developer where the threshold was. The processing works on panning, so a narrow or mono source gives it little to separate.