COLLIN JORDAN: Hi. I’m Collin Jordan, and we’re here at the Boiler Room, my music mastering studio in Chicago, Illinois. I’ve been doing this for 10 years now, and I’ve had this studio for about five. Today I’m going to be showing you some of the mastering equipment that I use here in the studio.

This is the Manley Stereo Variable Mu limiter/compressor. This is my main analog compressor that I use here in the studio. It’s a very popular mastering compressor. One of the things that I like about it is that it’s got an ability to really kind of give some force to a mix. It has something that it does to the top end which is hard to describe but it just makes things kind of jump a little bit better. This box is great for gelling a mix together.

One of the things about mastering is that it’s all about taking what sounds like a bunch of instruments playing and kind of gelling it into a band, and this thing is really good at doing that. I think that’s the function of the compressor and then also the transformers that it uses. It’s all tube and transformer based so it’s got the great analog sound. But a lot of people associate tubes with sort of a warming or darkening effect. This actually tends to make things a little bit brighter or crunchier which can be nice.

I’ve got it pretty heavily customized for mastering. These are not potentiometers. They are actually switches and there are a couple of different reasons for that. One is repeatability. I can automatically -- if somebody needs to come back for touch-ups, I can go to exactly the settings I had and not just close, not like 12:30 or something. It’s actually minus two or minus two and a half. The other thing that that helps out with is stereo imaging. If one of these, say the output knob, was just a little bit off, on a potentiometer, you can end up maybe making the whole mix right-heavy or left-heavy and this avoids that.

I’ve also had the high pass side chain filter mod done. What that does is you can selectively cut out the low end that is going to the side chain of the compressor so therefore you’re not compressing the low end. One of the main complaints that people have about this compressor is that it can kind of kill the bass and it actually can. But with this mod, it really eliminates that and it sounds amazing. I actually think that this mod should be standard on the compressor. I really think that it’s -- I had this compressor for a couple of years without it and it’s so much better with it.

One of the things about this compressor is I’m actually running audio through it right now, and this would be a typical setting for how I use it in a mastering session and you’ll notice that the meters actually aren’t even moving or are just barely moving. These are VU meters, and so you’re not going to see the peaks that you’re reducing through the compressor, drums for example. So, on this one if you’re using it for mastering and you’re seeing a lot of new movement, you’re probably compressing too much, and that was something I had to get used to years ago. When I first started using one of these, I would always overdrive or over-compress the material just because I was used to seeing meters bouncing. So, as long as you treat it pretty gently, this box can sound great. And then it has pretty slow attack times and pretty fast recovery times and I can drive the box harder or not so hard depending on what I’m trying to do. It’s great for kind of beefing up mixes if you hit it real hard, and then you can back it down and use it more subtlely.