Thanks for the detailed explanation, I forgot about the threshold level : important difference indeed ^^ But I've read some transients plugins were claiming to be level-independant. Aren't all transients shapers level-independant by their very nature or did I misunderstood something ?bmanic wrote:Only technicalities. The SPL transient shaper is basically two opposing envelope followers controlling the VCA. When you make a difference to one of them, for instance shortening the attack of the negative one, you get transient reduction because the faster envelope generator (which is doing negative gain) reacts faster, thus squashing the transient. Do the opposite and you get transient enhancement. Same thing with the release stage but this time it reacts on the sustain portion of the sound. It's a rather brilliant design but hard to make "jitter" free (the SPL plugin suffers from less jitter than some of the competition but is worse than the NI version in this regard, at least in my opinion).Davias wrote: I was just giving my point of view about compression and also asking myself what differentiate a transient shaper from a compressor ^^
Both dynamics processors can achieve similar results, namely increasing dynamic range. Opening up the attack of a compressor with a moderate release will separate the initial transient from the sustain, thus increasing dynamic range.
You can also build/program a compressor to do upwards expansion, that is have a positive gain curve/transfer function meaning that any sound going over the threshold is actually louder by the set ratio. Very useful. With this kind of unit you can actually boost the sustain part by simply opening up the attack so that the initial transient does not gain any volume.
So many ways of achieving similar results. In the end it all comes down to how the thing is wired on the inside (how program dependent it is etc.).
The difference between the 2 opposing envelope generators versus an upwards expander is that you do not need a threshold control at all because it is dealing with differences between the two envelope generators. With the upwards expander you need to specify a threshold of when the gain addition happens. Both have their uses. One is fiddly to set up properly but gives the user more precise control.
Cheers!
bManic
Anyway that was useful read ^^
to me it was more a leveller than a compressor, it never ever catched any fast transients, but the tubes sounded really good, they did a really nice sheen on the hf part, almost like a very good but minimally used tubeexiter... so yeah, i won't be able to tell if it absolutely nails the original (which i doubt, simply because there cannot be even 2 of them sounding the same, these are so complex and fully handmade, there must be tons of minimal differences between the summary of components used to build one), but i'll catch the character if it's there, for sure... heck, i don't even care if it sounds like a real fairchild, as long as it sounds good to my petted ears... 
