Drawmer LX20

The Drawmer LX20 soft-knee stereo compressor is one of the first budget comp's you can look at getting. Hundreds of thousands of budget (& bigger) studio's have an LX20 in the rack so check one out.

What can you say about the LX20 that hasn't already been said?.. God knows how many of these Drawmer have shifted over the years but it must be in the order of hundreds of thousands of the buggers cos the LX20 is THE definitive quality budget compressor.

The unit works as two mono compressors or one linked stereo unit... you get an expander-gate on each input, and proper side chaining for each channel too for all your ducking & de-essing tasks etc... yup.. a great all round unit.

Each side has threshold (compress), attack & release & an output gain make-up control... each side also features a bypass switch & in the center is the stereo-link switch which when switched in passes the threshold control over to the left-side of the gate if i remember right whilst you can still of course set some of the parameters of each side uniquely...

The LX20 is a 'soft-knee' compressor - (for more on what that is exactly, see the Dancetech FX-RACK section, compressor page) - Most compressors have a Threshold control to set WHEN the signal should start to be compressed, and a RATIO control, to set the compression ratio... 'Soft-Knee' compression does away with the ratio and makes that incremental to compression amount... and this makes 'Soft-knee' compression the ideal newbie compression type as well as the fact it is versatile in all levels of studio... so, there is no 'ratio' control with 'soft-knee'.. all you have to worry about is, "does it sound ok?" - Setting up and using a soft-knee comp' is all intuitive and easy to use on a variety of programme material...

I actually own an LX20, have done for years, and it's a great unit... does hard/fast compression on kiks & basses etc ok, and soft/slow gentle stuff for slower sounds as well as working ok as a master stereo comp' across a mix if used gently works ok too.. you can use this on vocals, drums, basses or acoustic guitars etc.. and i've done de-essing with it using the side-chain which all works great !!

Well there it is... along with the Yamaha & alesis units these LX20's are the best budget compressors, well worth a check-out !!... user comments please !....