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[muddy]

has anyone heard one of these? for almost $2000, i'm kinda curious.


ml

[Fibes]

I'm curious too. I'm more excited about the reissue of the 16 second delay however. Yep, they are...

[trexrox]

The compressor name, NYC2 had me guessing it was a play on the LA2 name, and wondering if that had anything to do with the circuit design... could it be an LA2 copy?

[malice]

shangrila wrote on Wed, 02 June 2004 09:00

The compressor name, NYC2 had me guessing it was a play on the LA2 name, and wondering if that had anything to do with the circuit design... could it be an LA2 copy?

it's even better than that : NY 2A ...

and it's optical

sounds like a revolution...

again
malice

[Fletcher]

I saw it at the AES show in Berlin a couple weeks ago... it looks like it might have potential.  We've been waiting for them to send us one to check out.

[Jeffrey Roberts]

I had an NY2A in my studio a few weeks ago, serial #3, courtesy of Eddie Ciletti at Mix Magazine.

Eddie specifically asked me to evaluate the NY2A as a bass compressor.

My general inclinations are to like things with tubes and transformers, and I'm definitely a fan of opto based compressors.

The thought of all of that iron, and three different optical detectors had me very interested. And I'm old enough to have cut my teeth on a mono Webcor recorder with the "winky eye" level meter.

My main comment on the unit is that is surprisingly difficult to operate in spite of the relative lack of controls. What I'm trying to say here is that it is hard to get the unit to sound good. It can sound good, but it's hard to find those sweet spots.

As a bass compressor, it worked well, but it didn't make me think that it was time to sell my LA2A or 1176 either. I found it "nice", but not mind-blowing gotta have it, can't live without it.....

The NY2A did not sound good for aggressive compression. It was best for light 2/1 compression of just a few db.in the electroluminescent mode with the the "squash" button on. I did not like the other detector modes for compressing electric bass.

With further development, the NY2A will no doubt be considerably improved. If they would tweak some of their resistor values it would be a lot easier to examine the different detector possibilities. As it is now, the threshold jumps wildly when switching detectors, just as changing ratios on a stock LA4 makes the threshold change.

Eddie Ciletti has a mod for LA4's that eliminates the threshold shift problem. When he told Electro Harmonix how to fix their threshold jumping problem they were not interested. Maybe they don't want to make the NY2A easy to use and versatile.

The "winky eye" meter seemed pretty useless to me. I wanted to like it.

I found the NY2A useless as a program compressor, way too hard to get decent sound out of.

As it sits now, I find the NY2A to be a very expensive space heater. If Electro Harmonix puts in the time to refine the NY2A so that it's not so hard to get decent sound out of it, they'll probably have a winner.

My advice: Wait for the Mercenary Edition.

[eddieaudio]

Hey y'all!  

I'm the one who loaned Jeff the NY-2A and I am a little surprised at his comments of it being "difficult," but there is enough potential gain that it might be a little unwieldy if the incoming signal is already hot.  There is a rear-panel attenuator, Jeff may not have realized that.

The NY-2A should also be terminated.  As Jeff mentioned, this was SN-#3, and I know that subsequent production models will have a termination switch.

I think the concept of three optos is great -- I didn't think I'd like the light-bulb-driven opto, but it was  always worth trying and very expressive.  Whereas the EL-opto was consistent over a wide range of Gain Reduction (GR) the bulb gave a rainbow of colors within that same window.  Whether those colors are use-able is not the point -- they will just be different from anything you've heard.  Kinda refreshing.

The LED makes a great, fast peak limiter, BUT it's threshold, IMHO, is set way too high, so I did the unusual -- modified and recalibrated the threshold for the three optos -- this is not your father's oldsmobile review.  If you've ever read about, or tried to do, an A/B/X comparison, that's all I was trying to accomplish -- to minimize the variables so I could concentrate on each OPTO's signature without resetting the controls.  

EHX feels quite the opposite -- that the radical thresholds enhance the differences.  Hey, it's their box, we don't agree.  Only time and user feedback will tell.  They did design this box to be abused, hence the input and output gain controls.  I'd be curious to know what other users think.

ec