Rupert Neve Designs Portico 543: 500 Series Mono Compressor

Description

The Rupert Neve Designs Portico 543 Mono Compressor delivers the unobtrusive, musical-sounding dynamic control and brick-wall limiting made famous in the Portico 5043 to the 500 series format. The 543 features a fully controllable compressor-limiter with feed-forward / feedback modes, Peak / RMS detection and a built-in sidechain high pass filter. With an unrivaled heritage and a tremendous feature set, the 543 yields a combination of rich warmth, flexibility and precision that is sure to resonate in the ears of sound engineers the world over.Built around Mr. Rupert Neve’s custom transformer designs, each 543 module encompasses individually controllable threshold, attack, release, makeup gain, ratio, side chain HPF, Feed-Forward / Feed-back selection and Peak/RMS detection modes. With the compressor inactive, the 543 may be used as a transformer-coupled, high-performance line amplifier, and two 543 may be linked for stereo operation as well. The chassis is built to standard 500 series specifications, with power and I/O provided by the rack.How the Compressor WorksIn order to control gain, a V.C.A. or Voltage Controlled Amplifier (or Attenuator) is used. There are many types of V.C. including the use of tubes, discrete and integrated solid state circuits, and naturally non-linear devices. Each one has its characteristic behavior that reflects sonically on the final performance, and gives it a character or signature that can be musically attractive or not! The Portico 543 makes use of a very accurate, low-noise, low-distortion V.C.A. having, essentially, no signature of its own.A part of the audio signal is rectified and smoothed to produce a suitable control voltage for the V.C.A. which has to respond very quickly and have low distortion. If the response is too fast, low frequency signals will themselves, be gain controlled! If the response is too slow, the signal will overshoot and the first few cycles will not get compressed. The speed and accuracy of the response, known as the “attack\