How the heck do you use the Expander?

[mementus]

I need some practical examples here

Is the expander going to increase the volume after the treshold?
Do you have a plug-in advice to tweak with?

[mementus]

Holy cow!

[DMG68]

An expander makes the quiet parts quieter. Think of it like a gate that still lets some sound through, how much sound comes through depends on how you set it up.

[whyterabbyt]

An expander makes the quiet parts quieter.

...and the loud parts louder.

Think of it like a gate that still lets some sound through, how much sound comes through depends on how you set it up.

Nope, think of it like the opposite of a compressor (because thats what it is).... instead of limiting dynamic changes, it increases them. In the same way that very high compression is basically limiting, very high expansion is basically gating, but gating isnt its purpose.

Compression followed by 'something' followed by expansion (ie a 'compander') was a very common way to get more dynamics through the something, by the way. Very common in eg classic spring reverb and BBD delay designs, for example, and the basics behind classic Dolby noise reduction, AFAIR

[DMG68]

Makes sense. I obviously never push one hard enough to notice much difference in the loud parts. I'll have to do this. I always thought it increased dynamics by just lowering below the threshold only.

[Gamma-UT]

Makes sense. I obviously never push one hard enough to notice much difference in the loud parts. I'll have to do this. I always thought it increased dynamics by just lowering below the threshold only.

You can have upward expansion, downward expansion or both. Realistically, many uses of expansion in production are of the downward kind (i.e. making the quiet bits quieter). Flux:: has specific plugins for the two kinds of expansion – one is the DCompressor for upward expansion and the Expander for downward expansion.