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Message: [QUOTE="Queen, post: 90459, member: 27"] Parallel compression blends a heavily compressed copy of a signal with the untouched original, so the loud parts never actually lose their edge. The crushed version fills in everything underneath. The dry version keeps the hits intact. That makes it upward compression in practice, even though a downward compressor is doing the work. Quiet detail gets lifted towards the front, while the peaks stay where the performance put them. Nothing gets flattened, because the flattened copy is only ever part of what you hear. Ears help the illusion along. People notice a sudden drop in volume far more easily than they notice quiet material creeping up, which is why a well-set blend can add a lot of density before anyone clocks that compression is happening at all. [HEADING=2]New York rooms named the sound before plugins existed[/HEADING] Mike Beville wrote the method up in Studio Sound back in 1977, applying it to classical recordings where obvious gain riding would have been unforgivable. Bob Katz later gave the technique its proper name. Neither of them was chasing punch on a drum bus. The nickname came from somewhere louder. New York mix engineers took to it heavily through the 1990s, Tony Maserati among them, and the sound became associated with the city closely enough that the alternative name stuck. Michael Brauer pushed the idea further on vocals by running several compressors in parallel at once, picking each unit for its tone rather than its dynamic control. The blend, not the gain reduction, is the instrument in that setup. [HEADING=2]A millisecond of drift wrecks a parallel drum bus[/HEADING] Digital routing introduces a problem the old analogue rooms mostly avoided. If the compressed path carries even a millisecond more delay than the dry path, the two versions fight when they sum, and you get comb filtering that hollows the whole thing out. Differences in the region of 0.3 to 3 milliseconds are enough to cause it. The usual fix is to stop feeding one path directly. Pull the channels off the main output and send them to two separate buses instead, so both routes travel the same distance before they meet again. Using the same compressor model on each bus matters too, since different designs report different latency. Most modern systems apply automatic delay compensation and handle this quietly, but a blend control inside the compressor removes the argument before it starts. The sum happens internally, at one single point in the chain, and [URL='https://goldmidi.com/community/threads/m-media-audio-introduced-the-the-new-yorker-vari-mu-compressor.75872/'][B]a valve-style compressor with a blend control on the front panel[/B][/URL] never gives the two paths a chance to drift apart. [HEADING=2]Fast attacks punch and short releases pump[/HEADING] Drums respond to the aggressive end. A quick attack clamps down on the transient in the crushed path, and [B]a short release setting that lets the bus breathe between hits[/B] produces the pumping motion people usually mean when they talk about weight. Blend it under the dry kit, and the punch stays. Bass wants the opposite treatment. A medium attack lets the initial note through, while a longer release holds the sustain steady rather than chopping it into sections. Direct bass in particular thickens up fast with this approach. One warning applies to every source. Turning the blend up turns the whole channel up as well, so a quick comparison will always flatter the louder version. Match the levels first, then decide whether the crushed path actually earned its place. Vocals sit somewhere between the two. Colourful compressors earn their place here, because the parallel path is adding character alongside density, and the dry vocal carries the diction regardless of what the crushed copy is doing to consonants. Whole-mix parallel compression is a harder sell, since anything already glued by a bus compressor rarely needs a second layer of density underneath it. [/QUOTE]

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