Antelope Audio COMP-4K-BUS

COMP-4K-BUS is the famous ‘mix’ glue bus compressor of the 80s. It resides on the master bus of a fondly remembered series of vintage British consoles and its job is to bring together instruments and performances from tens of audio channels into one larger-than-life, cohesive whole. Decades later, still, nothing does that quite like the COMP-4K-BUS. It’s the gold standard of mix bus compression and it’s now coming to life on the Antelope Synergy Core platform.

Put the COMP-4K-BUS on your Master fader and start mixing right into it or use it after everything else in your mix is ‘said and done’ to turn it into a balanced, homogenous production. Don’t worry about latency and CPU power, with Synergy Core processing they have become a thing of the difficult past!

Heritage

The original design was first born as a modified dbx 161 and lived in the center sections of those early Oxford consoles. That gave it its aggressive and punchy sound which shaped most of rock and pop music over the past four decades.

Like any piece of equipment that has reached similar popularity and overwhelming approval of the people using it, this compressor has been cloned and copied by countless hardware and software companies. The analog circuitry has long left the centerpieces of those early consoles and is now living predominantly in 19-inch rack units and 500-series format. Companies have kept altering and modifying their clones so as a result its inherent dbx punch has somewhat been lost.

To bring back the essence that built its reputation we have made a faithful recreation of the original design by modeling a unit from one of those early consoles. To stay true to the heritage of this compressor and to remind people where the circuitry came from we also included the “Auto Fade” feature found only on the original center sections with an adjustable-rate in seconds.

Modern Functionality

Music has evolved over the past decades and so have the tools we use to shape it. Sub low frequencies often play a vital part in modern music and present danger of triggering the bus compressor, which often results in an over-compressed mix. To prevent that and to meet the needs of modern producers and engineers we have included a sweepable SideChain Filter.

Other than mix bus applications this compressor has also proven itself as a powerful parallel processor. To accommodate the so-called New York-style compression the COMP-4K-BUS is equipped with a “Mix” knob that can determine the blend between the compressed and unprocessed signal, which expands its versatility beyond the mix bus.