BILL HOLLAND: Welcome back to Gearwire.Com. I'm once again Bill Holland, and this is the dbx 166XL, a compressor/expander/gate with limiting that is used on vocals, guitars, drums. Anything you can pass a signal through, you can throw one of these on. Now, you may have seen these in professional studios, why would you want this in a home studio? Well, the reason is that it can it handle your audio in the front end of things instead of doing post after you've gone in the computer. Now of course you can also do this as an insert to your sound card or interface and play back the files that way and re-record them.

But I like to do things at the front end. The reason why is for example, right now I'm talking but you don't hear me peaking. A lot of times when you go straight into a DAW preamp, there's no built-in limiter or compressing, or if there's a built-in limiter it's not necessarily that good of a limiter. So if I have my own hardware solution, it allows me to have my voice be nice and even and handle any peaking issues right off the back going into the computer, so you know they're going to be good going in, you know you'll have a nice, even recording going into your computer, so let's move over to the close-up and see what this thing can do.

Now right off the bat, you'll hear that I have gate on my voice. My expander/gate controls right here. You'll see I have the threshold setting. What this allows me to do is set the level at which my noise rolls off. Let me set the release to really, really fast. You can hear when I'm talking, you -- where my vocals are right there, you'll hear that it cuts in and out whenever I get quiet. To curb that, I just take the release control up to slow, and now, there's a slow release you'll hear the noise kind of fade out. Now if I want that to change, I can lower the threshold exactly where I want it to roll off the noise, and I can set this longer if I want to have a longer trail, and even lower. If I listen for the noise, I can set it exactly to where I want it. So your noise floor is right about there. There's also SC enable, which now if you listen to my voice, is a little bit smoother going into my voice coming back in instead of that harsh cut you got before.

So here we have our threshold control. This allows us to control the decibels at which it starts compressing my voice, so in this situation you'll notice the green like stays on at below, but if I raise it up and I keep talking, you'll see same result because as it gets higher, it's actually going higher than my voice so I'm going to lower it down until I get that yellow light. So you'll see at that point it's going to crush my voice. However, right now it's not doing that because I have this, the ratio, set 1:1. What that means is per every 1 dB you increase in volume, it's actually only taking only 1 to increase it, but if I take it up to say 2:1, what this means is that for every 1 dB my volume increases, I have to actually have a real increase of 2 dB. So if I increase 4 dB for example, my volume's only going to go up by 2 dB, and it increases exponentially until we get to 4:1, 16:1 and then infinity which means that no amount of volume increase will increase by 1 dB. You can't, and it's what's called a brick wall limiter when you have this set all the way here. It's basically crushing your signal, making everything even. Notice how there's absolutely no variation in the level of my voice. It's all very loud and it's all at the same level.

Now, the reason why it allowed me to get that loud even is if I set my attack back it's going to, as soon as I get loud, it's going to decrease my voice and bring my level down. However, if I get rid of that, get ready for this to be pretty loud. I'm going to be very loud! See that? So it takes a second for it to kick in, but it put it here it's an immediate response, and you'll see the lights in the gain reduction meter here so if I make it reduce my gain, it's going to take a second to respond, but I set it to fast it's going to respond right away.

Release is how long it takes to let up on the compression. So let's say you have a bass, kick, and a snare and you have this set to a slow release. If you set the release too long, it's going to be at the level it was when it compressed the kick drum, which let's say the kick's really loud. You've got a 909 kick, and you want your snare to be nice and loud. If the release is too long, it's still going to be keeping the volume way down there, and what will happen is you'll lose your snare and your hi-hats, so you want to keep your release back a little bit. However, if it's a fast release, it will pop back right away to the normal level which means that your hi-hats are going to come up, you know, really big in the forefront, and when the snare comes, it's going to crush it back down again. That can be really useful to if you want your hi-hats to be really loud, but if you want to kind of have your snare and your kick to be the main parts of your mix, you might want to take the release off a little bit.

Now, the output gain is just the basic level of output from my signal going in. Here you'll notice we also have a peak limiter. This just lets us set at what point it limits your peak. It doesn't let you get above a certain point and cause distortion to occur. Here it's not that obvious though because I don't have a really good preamp on the other side of this, but if I did you would see that this would actually block any peaking from happening. But as you'll notice I'm not really on the red right now so that's part of why that's occurring.

Now something else I could do is I can actually stereo couple these, so I can have signals on both sides so like this will join that side. This will be the left and that will be the right, and the controls will be universal. However, right now, I'm just doing two mono signals so I'm going to keep that off.

Now let's take a look at the back side. I have both channel 1 and channel 2 here although you'll notice channel 1 and channel 2 are identical in their outputs and connections, so I'm only going to focus on the 1. You'll notice I have a microphone plugged in here. Normally I'll have a preamp going before the compressor but in this case I just didn't have one set up. I have a 1/4" unbalanced input for either guitars or any line sources you might have like a keyboard, a -10 pad just to pad the signal coming in, a balanced and unbalanced output.

We also have a side chain insert, which allows you to create a side chain effect or send this as a side chain as well. The way this works is you'll use what's called an insert cable, and you plug it into here, and the other end splits into two 1/4" connections, one labeled tip and one labeled ring. Tip is the input so you can hook that up to your send, and then ring is your output, so you can send that to the return, and that will create a side chaining loop. You'll hear this a lot actually when DJs talk on the radio, the music will go down. That's not all manual fade. A lot of times, especially on football games, you'll notice that the volume just automatically goes down. It's because they have a compressor routed in as a side chain.

Well, that was the 166XL compressor/limiter/gate from dbx. My name is Bill Holland, and you're watching Gearwire.Com.