Origin Effects Cali76 Compressor Review

Firstly, thanks for coming to the site. If this is useful to you, please consider liking and commenting here and it would mean a lot if you subscribe to the YouTube channel too when watching the video below.

Remember if you're subscribed, as well as getting the latest lessons and reviews sent right to you, you can have your say on what reviews, demos and lessons you want. Just comment at the bottom of the page.

'The Cali76 Compact Deluxe is an 1176-style studio-grade FET compressor. Featuring high-current, low-noise, discrete Class-A circuitry, and a dedicated parallel compression control…'

The above is taken directly from Origin Effects website, but what exactly does it all mean?

The 1176 compressor first came about when Bill Putnam decided to start using solid state technology in a redesign of his 175/176 tube compressor and it was first released in 1968. You may not have heard of Putnam, but if you’ve any interest in recording your own music and mixing it, you’ll have come across Universal Audio and their great interfaces and plugins. Bill Putnam was the founder of Universal Audio and an innovator of much of the recording gear and processes that are ubiquitous in studios today.

The solid state technology Putnam utilised was a type of transistor called a ‘field effect transistor’ or a FET, and one major advantage of the FET over the tube predecessors was its incredibly fast attack time – 0.00002 seconds at its fastest!

In case you’re interested in how a FET works, it functions as a variable voltage resistor and pushes some of the input signal to ground and changing gain through working with the electrical field as a whole. But let’s not get too bogged down in the technicalities.

So, back to the original 1176. The amount of compression was set by adjusting the input level, which is carried over in the Cali76 - the higher the input, the more compression that takes place. The 1176 also had a wide range of tones with its compression ratios starting at an almost transparent 4:1, through to 8:1, 12:1 and 20:1 - the first two mainly used for compressing and the latter two for limiting. In fact, the original 1176 was first advertised as a “true peak limiter” when it was first released.

However, studio engineers were not just enamoured with the previously unimaginably fast attack and release times, but the quality of sound that the 1176 imparted to the signal passed through it. Even with the compressor turned off, it imparted a recognisable and desirably snappy, yet warm tone.

Want to read more?

Subscribe to samgoffenguitar.com to keep reading this exclusive post.

Subscribe Now