Becos FX CompIQ Mini

Just how much analogue compressor can you fit in a mini pedal? Becos spent several years answering that question...

I’ve reviewed some larger pedals in Becos’ CompIQ range before — most recently the CompIQ Twain (SOS September 2021) and, a year earlier, the CompIQ Stella. I’ve played guitar for a few decades but have put just as much time into recording and mixing, and find that traditional guitar compressors tend to leave me feeling cold: fine for adding sustain but often rudimentary and noisy compared with tools I use in the studio. So I was over the moon about the control and quality on offer in those Becos devices. At heart, they’re studio‑quality VCA compressors in a pedal format, but they offer lots of bells and whistles — more than any rack gear I own, in fact. It all adds up to give you supreme control over your tone.

Features

Becos have since relocated to Vienna, where they’ve revised and developed their CompIQ concept. Their latest release is the CompIQ Mini and, as the name implies, it’s packed into a tiny enclosure. Becos aren’t the first pedal company to make such efficient use of pedalboard space, but since they specialise in putting more all‑analogue control and features into their pedals than most, this form factor presents significant challenges, and their designer told me it took five years and six version iterations to distil and compact all the features he wanted to fit into this format.

The top panel gives the user a huge amount of control over this compressor, including switching between feedback and feed‑forward topologies.Those efforts have been very successful. First, the pedal is designed around a THAT 4320 Blackmer VCA chip, and high‑quality ‘name’ components are used throughout, including Vishay‑Dale resistors, and WIMA, Panasonic, and Cornell Dubilier capacitors. There are high‑quality, gold‑plated, contact micro‑switches, jack connectors and PCB traces and pads, as well as less obvious reliability features such as protection for high voltages and voltage polarity inversion, and all is beautifully assembled in a sturdy enclosure. This pedal should give you years of service. In fact, I’m told that Becos haven’t yet experienced any product failures, and they offer a three‑year warranty of the product, even where the original owner sells it on.

Perhaps more impressive to me is that, as you should be able to see from the photos, Becos have packed lots of user control into this pedal without making the top panel feel remotely cramped. The white legend is clear and crisp, and its high contrast with the sturdy black enclosure makes it easy to read in low light, despite the small fonts used.

The CompIQ Mini can accept power from 9‑12 V DC centre‑negative PSUs, courtesy of a standard power inlet at the back/top (obviously there’s no internal battery option in a pedal of this size). Audio comes in on the right side through a Neutrik quarter‑inch jack, and out the other side through another. The jacks are offset to allow close placement of similar pedals on your board.

In terms of control, you have three pots: one to set the ratio from 1:1 (no compression) to infinity:1 (akin to limiting); another to set the threshold over a generous range (‑40 to +10 dBu); and an output gain...