Cali76 - Field report
Posted: Wed Aug 13, 2014 2:05 pm
So I finally broke down and bought a Cali76 compressor, which is inspired by the Urei 1176.
After a few hours with it, I have to declare hype deserved. I've bought, built and breadboarded tons of compressors and this really is on a whole other level. The tone is incredibly lush and the performance is excellent.
Early observations:
It's HUGE! I included a pic with a 1590b for scale. I mean, I knew it was big, but I didn't know it was going to be BIIIGG.
The input 'buffer' has quite a bit of gain and lots of color. It came in buffered bypass mode and it was immediately obvious this wasn't my normal bypass tone. I moved the jumpers to go to true bypass since I need to test other pedals.
It's not completely silent like my favorite optical compressor, but it's close - not anything like OTA (Dyna, Janglebox) comp noise.
Headroom isn't as high as I would like, even running it at 18V. Being able to adjust the input gain is nice. When I was taking the gut shot pic I moved the gain reduction jumper over one space, so I'll see what that does.
It's got a blue 3PDT in there, which I don't like at all. I won't be turning it off much, so what's the difference, right?
After a few hours with it, I have to declare hype deserved. I've bought, built and breadboarded tons of compressors and this really is on a whole other level. The tone is incredibly lush and the performance is excellent.
Early observations:
It's HUGE! I included a pic with a 1590b for scale. I mean, I knew it was big, but I didn't know it was going to be BIIIGG.
The input 'buffer' has quite a bit of gain and lots of color. It came in buffered bypass mode and it was immediately obvious this wasn't my normal bypass tone. I moved the jumpers to go to true bypass since I need to test other pedals.
It's not completely silent like my favorite optical compressor, but it's close - not anything like OTA (Dyna, Janglebox) comp noise.
Headroom isn't as high as I would like, even running it at 18V. Being able to adjust the input gain is nice. When I was taking the gut shot pic I moved the gain reduction jumper over one space, so I'll see what that does.
It's got a blue 3PDT in there, which I don't like at all. I won't be turning it off much, so what's the difference, right?