In-Depth: Opto Compressor

Ben Hammond gives an in-depth demonstration of Opto.
Famous for their smooth and musical sound and ability to tame vocals, bass, and even drums, optical compression is an essential addition to your compressor toolkit.
What happens when you take the characteristics of a rack-full of highly desirable optical compressors and combine them into one killer unit? You get the Opto!
Get Opto for your SQ or Avantis here:
shop.allen-heath.com/

[@bltMovie]

Thank you for the very good tutorials. Keep up the good work! A small request for future videos: let's listen longer to the sound in direct comparison of dry and wet, without talking in the meantime. Thank you!

[@claudiocheulini]

Definitely my fav comp from the A&H collection.. even the one in the GLD was pretty great, this one is clearer/better imho (at least on the dLive, which should be identical btw). Thanks for these video series.. keep ‘em coming, these are great instructional videos too, plus they show what the dLive plugs can achieve.. Thank you Ben and A&H! :)

[@davelongenecker649]

Some bookmarks for me: Opto attributes 0:04 Snare 0:32 Vocals (singing drummer) 6:47 Mixbus 9:34 Overview 11:24

[@nekejkwkwkdjd]

Como

[@krcameron5272]

AT 3:35-3:45 I've noticed the same thing in your other tutorials when you talk about triple-micing the snare... w/o the compressor (basically raw snare group mix) it sounds like a flam on the snare. With your compression the flam sounds like a single strike. So are you sure you don't have a slight pre-amp delay on one of your snare mics?

[@djbassick]

I noticed your percussion levels are almost clipping. Whereas the other gains look like they’re in the line level/-18 dbfs range. Is that typical for drums?

[@djbassick]

How do you handle gain staging with these types of compressors? It’s not as visual as a standard one where you reducing by 6 dB then adding 6 dB, for example