Fredenstein V.A.S. Comp

I use this between a Camden EC1 pre-amp and Audient ID14, for voice over, with various mics. It gives me confidence that I am not going to peak and distort the audio input while getting a strong signal to noise ratio. The majority of voice over quality is in the performance, but this helps. After leaving my first review I learned more about this and so am updating the review. The knobs are tricky to use having no logical grading increments and are sweep with no notches - there is a lot of change for only a tiny amount of rotation. There are increment lines marked but they evry 3.33 on the scale so not really useful - essentially I do most of my ratio, attack and release adjusting by ear. You have to have patience and make slight changes to the attack, and release, but not be afraid of cranking up the input gain to kick the compressor into life. I was too afraid of the input gain and makeup gain when I started using this and as a result struggled to get it to be effective, but now I have learned the importance of adding substantial gain on the input it has brought the unit to life.