Lindell Audio are a relatively young Swedish company, founded by Tobias Lindell, in-house engineer at the world-famous Bohus Studios in Gothenburg. Already, they have released two interesting loudspeaker designs, and they’ve now made taken their first step into the outboard market, with the 17X compressor.
A 2U device, the 17X compressor/limiter is described by its makers as “our take on the classic 1176 sound”, and it features the same fixed-threshold/variable-input-gain arrangement as Universal Audio’s classic levelling amplifier. It also offers the same five compression ratios as the original (4:1, 8:1, 12:1 and 20:1), as well as a hard-limiting 100:1 setting, which is designed to simulate the sound of an 1176 with all its ratio buttons selected at once (a happy accident of the 1176’s design, which many engineers have used for an obviously-compressed, pumping sound).
The 17X, however, adds a few modern touches to its vintage attributes. A high-pass filter can be switched into the side-chain signal, for example, at frequencies of 100Hz, 200Hz, 300Hz or 600Hz. The input signal can also be either high- or low-pass filtered via two illuminated switches on the left of the front panel, at turnover frequencies of 80Hz and 12kHz, respectively. Finally, a large knob on the right mixes the dry signal in with the processed signal, for parallel compression.
Other features include a hard-wired bypass, Carnhill transformer-coupled input and output, and a three-way switch for selecting between metering modes: input, output or gain reduction.
The Lindell Audio 17X is set to sell for €2150.
