Product Review - Lindell Audio 17X

In part, that has meant adding things he feels are missing from the 1176. As with the Slate Pro Dragon, for example, you’ll find high-pass filters for the compressor’s side-chain, and a wet/dry mix control. The combination of these two features can make a huge difference to the degree of control you have over the sound. The side-chain high-pass filter enables you to make the compressor ignore prominent low-frequency (LF) content in instruments such as kick and bass. What this means in practice is that you can avoid unwanted pumping but achieve plenty of solidity, while leaving low-end elements on a bus, such as kicks and bass guitar, or the lower frequencies of individual instruments relatively ‘unsquished’. There are five selectable high-pass frequency options for the side-chain filter: off, 100Hz, 200Hz, 300Hz and 600Hz, taking you well into the low mid-range territory of instruments such as guitar, snare drum and vocals. There are also fixed-frequency switchable high and low-pass filters for the audio signal. These slope gently at 6dB/octave, and should be useful for cleaning up rumble or other unwanted noises at the frequency extremes.

The wet/dry mix control is useful because it gives the user instant access to parallel compression without the need to juggle two separate controls to maintain the levels, or to tie up mixer channels. It’s such a simple, yet incredibly useful feature that I can’t understand why everyone (including UA with their 1176!) doesn’t incorporate this into their processors!