 These compressors are the Warm Audio WA-2A and WA-76, both based on the renowned LA-2A and 1176 respectively, and it's no wonder these compressors have been remodeled in both hardware and plug-in format as they are two of the most widely used compressors of all time. But which is best? Hi folks, I'm Mike and I hope you're well. The 2A and 76 style compressors may both be very popular, but they're also incredibly different. Now whilst the principles involved are the same for both plug-ins and hardware, for this video I've chosen to use these Warm Audio models to demonstrate. You can find links for both of those in the description down below, where you'll also find a link for the sponsor of this video, DistroKid. If you follow that link, you'll get 7% off an already amazing price to distribute your music around the world. Now let's get incredibly nerdy and talk about the technical differences between these compressors. The 2A is an optical compressor, meaning it uses a light dependent resistor and an electro optical cell to control gain reduction. It has a tube based design with the gain reduction circuitry driven by a combination of tubes and opto cells. The 76 on the other hand is a solid state compressor using field effect transistors or FETs for gain reduction. If all of that sounds like a science lesson to you, don't worry, we're going to get into what all of these differences really mean in practice later. But first, what about the controls? Most of the controls on the 2A are not actually related to compression. We have some control over the way the meter behaves, a couple of different modes and some control over frequency response, but essentially not much direct control over compression. Even the gain control on the left is actually just for output and doesn't actually affect compression. It's labelled well in this instance, but on many hardware and software versions it's simply labelled gain, leading to some confusion about its role. But our main and most important control is the peak reduction knob. This can be thought of as kind of a threshold control that you might see on other compressors and turning it clockwise increases the amount of compression. The 76 on the other hand gives us lots of specific control over compression. The input control allows us to set the input around a fixed threshold, whilst like the 2A we also have an output control for make up gain. Next to this we see both attack and release knobs. The 76 is especially well known for its very fast attack and release. It's worth noting here that turning these knobs clockwise creates a faster or shorter attack and release. This may be opposite to the behaviour of other compressors, especially software based ones. Again, warm audio have labelled it clearly here to avoid confusion. Further to the right of these we see four buttons for various ratio settings and famously there is also the all button mode where we can latch all four buttons simultaneously to get a more gritty aggressive compression. Finally, like the 2A, the 76 gives us some control over how the meter behaves. So given the lack of extra controls on the 2A you may be wondering why people bother to even use it. Well to answer that I think we need to look at the nature of what it does. In compression mode the 2A uses a ratio of around about 4 to 1, but this is a little variable depending on source material. Likewise, the attack time is also variable depending on the source, but averages at around 10ms. Again, the release is a little source dependent and is a multi-stage to release. Generally the initial stage is around 60ms with a second stage lasting from 0.5 to 5 seconds depending on material. So why use the 2A? Well the end result of all of those quirks plus the other circuitry is a compressor which is known for its smooth, warm and transparent sound and that transparent nature is great when you want compression but you want the source to continue to sound natural. That's why it's favoured on vocals, I really like it on acoustic guitar and it's often used on bass guitar. This is a waveform of some of my bass playing and I want you to notice a couple of things about it. First of all notice that some of the notes are definitely much quieter than others. This is pretty typical of bass playing especially when you're not a great player like me. The second thing I want you to notice is the decay of some of the notes, especially look at this fourth note here, we can see the initial attack and then this is kind of ramp down as the note decays. Now let's compare it to the same bass playing but after my 2A compressor is applied. So you can notice right away that although some of the notes are quieter than others there's not quite so much disparity here, it's a lot more even. The other thing you can notice, again looking at the fourth note here, is there is a lot more sustain, the note doesn't decay nearly as quickly. This all helps to keep the bass present within the mix. So we're going to have a listen to this, first of all we'll listen to both of them in isolation one after the other and then we'll listen to them in the context of the music. So it's reasonably subtle but you can kind of hear that the bass manages to stay just a little bit more present, that's to do with the combination of the more even playing and also the tail of the note is just sustained a little bit longer. Of course it's also very easy to use because mostly you'll be focusing on that peak reduction knob a little bit like our sponsored DistroKid. All you have to do is upload your music, your album artwork and DistroKid takes care of distributing it to all of the major platforms like Spotify, iTunes, Amazon etc. Let's follow the link in the description down below. The 76 is renowned for fast attack and release times and just like the original 1176, attack times on this warm audio WA76 boasts a lightning fast 20-800 microseconds, likewise the release times range from 50 milliseconds to 1.1 seconds. On top of this as mentioned earlier we have four ratios ranging from 4-1 to 20-1 which is close to the feel of limiting. The all button mode results in a variable ratio between 12-1 and 20-1 and as a side effect of changes to the attack and release we can end up with an overdriven effect. All in all we could say that the 76 is far more aggressive and great for transient shaping making it useful for drums in particular but also any place where you want some extra energy. I particularly like it for parallel compression on vocals. So here I have a female vocal and it's being sent over to this bus here. Now that bus is actually connected up to my real WA76 compressor and we can see from its current settings that it's got a really fast attack time at the moment. It's just backed off from the fastest release time possible and I'm using an 8-1 ratio The idea here is to really squash the transients those bits at the beginning of words etc and to lift up the quieter parts and just out of interest if you want to look at the waveform after I've done this year on that bus you can see that those transients really have been squashed and those quieter parts are much much louder. Now just for fun let's have a listen to this bus soloed ok and see what the actual result of that is at the moment. And you're probably thinking it doesn't sound all that great it sounds overly compressed and it even sounds a little bit sort of distorted as well as a little bit of sort of overdrive going on there. But that's not really the point of this compression to listen to it in solo. The point of this is to blend in with the original vocal ok so it's just being used usually at a reasonably quieter volume ok you've got to sort of start off down low and then just blend in until you can just hear it. So what I'm going to do is play the track but we're going to start off with this compression bus actually muted ok so we can hear the vocal without it and then I'll stop it I'll unmute it and we'll hear the effect. And you can hear that it just helps to keep it a little bit more present ok it's a little bit subtle but definitely the quieter passages of those vocals are able to shine through a little bit more and actually don't mind that little bit of kind of grit that adds to it as well. So both of these compressors have their strengths in various situations but one of my favourite ways to use them is together with serial compression. So here we have the same female vocal that we were working with earlier only this time instead of sending it out to a bus I'm sending it straight out to my rack which contains my WA2A and my WA76. This would be the equivalent of inserting it as a plug-in ok in your channel. Now in actual fact the first unit that I'm going to is the WA76 and you can see with its settings here that the attack again is very very fast the release is pretty fast as well and I'm also again using an 8 to 1 ratio you could change this depending on what results you want to get. But notably on this occasion I've got the input turned down compared to where it was before and that means I'm not hitting the threshold as often as I was before. Now the role it's playing here is to get rid of some of these transients these sort of spikes that you can see on the waveform here ok. Now the reason I wouldn't use a 2A for this is because the release time is so slow that it was going to remain on even once those transients have passed and it's just going to be compressing parts of the signal that I don't want it to. However I am going from the WA76 to the WA2A. Now on this occasion I've got some pretty light compression settings ok it's probably only reducing you know 1 to 2 decibels at the most it's just sort of smoothing things out for me. Now if you want to see how those waveforms look at each stage let's switch over and have a look at that. So in purple we can see the original waveform here. The red one is after we've applied the 76 and you can definitely see that it's done a lot of the work here in getting rid of those transients. Now you can't see a lot of difference with the 2A in green but there's just a slight amount of difference and it's just helping to even things out to kind of smooth them off ok. So let's have a listen to the track. First of all we're going to have a listen to it without these components being used yeah just the original track and then I'll stop it and switch them on. Let's have a listen. So it's just helping again to make the quieter parts of the singing much louder and just to prevent those transients from getting out of control a really really useful way to make your vocals more present and don't forget we don't have to use them in this order sometimes for example I'll use the 2A first followed by the 76 I'll have the 2A in limited mode and the 76 in all button mode and apply it to something like a snare there really is no rules except experiment. So in the end there really is no best when it comes to these two compressors it just depends on what you're trying to achieve for more natural compression I would probably go for the 2A for something a lot more aggressive I would go for the 76 or of course you could use both the main thing that I would suggest is to compress with a purpose don't just use compression because you've heard it's a good thing to do think about what you want to achieve do you want to make the quieter parts louder do you just want to control some of the transients or do you want to add some sustain maybe you want to add a little color with both of these compressors you can add a little color even when you're not really using any compression now if you're still confused about the terms we use with compression in general I'd suggest you watch this video right here it actually focuses on the LA 2A style compressors however it does have a nice explanation about some of the terminology we use with compression thank you