Around the mid to late 80's the 'new-digital' boom was well underway; and the plethora of new budget gear was flooding the market as the home studio boom really took off after the release of the early fostex 8 tracks etc. Quite a few manufacturers responded to the call bringing to the table a whole bunch of cheap plastic-cased tabletop 1/2 size effect units - Companies such as Roland got in there with their BOSS 'mini-rack' series which appeared in two releases... the early grey plastic mini-rack series and the later 'posher' black metal cased series around the early 90's... Accesit were there already with their popular mini series, and others like rebis & Studiomaster had rack slot-in case type racks reminiscent of the famous rack set makes like Neve etc... Then to seal this type of series Alesis brought out their well known 'Micro' series including the famous groundbreaking Microverb 1 & 2... yup.. there certainly was a ton of cheap fx to get your paws on...
Akai entered the fray around 1988 with their 'mini-series of FX units... and this is the EX-70C Compressor-gate unit which you can pick up for cheap pocket money prices -
The unit features a freq response of 10Hz to 50Khz, and the usual controls of input level, ratio, attack, release and an output gain makeup - The gate section features a threshold which is shared with the compressor and a decay which goes from 1.5ms to 5 seconds to keep things quiet... there's some little led indicator lamps too to show the input peak and output gate at work...
Ok, not a star compressor, but these are cheap and can be used to get all sorts of fx like pumping basses & drum loops etc and for the normal uses of signal control - For more on compressors, see the Dancetech FX-Rack section... or the Dancetech Articles section
Well, a cheap full control compressor - they run off DC wall warts as far as I know, and this EX-70C offers a max compression of 32db...
The Akai EX-70C - user comments please !!...
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