Templo Devices 2 Track Tape-Style Compressor

Good used condition as pictured. 

STEREO COMPRESSION/BOOST (Heavily colored, Mild Distortion)

I found this diode compressor circuit in an electronics magazine from 1966. It was very crude and had a few design errors. I built one and immediately loved it. It was colorful and smooth and squeezed my attack in a pleasant way. It reminded me of the feel of cassette tape machines.

So I improved a few things to reduce white noise, added a VU to roughly show the squish, and then doubled the whole circuit in the same box to run in stereo. Then add in dual XLR outputs for good measure and I figured this thing should cover anything from pedalboard color box to studio gadget.

The input volume knob adds gain before the diodes, so the louder it goes in, the harder the squeeze. At the highest end of the input volume control it starts to distort in a pleasant way. It's not going to win fuzz pedal of the year, but there's some tasty sparkle to make things interesting.

The output control purely controls the total output volume. It has a good amount of boost, so can drive things after it pretty hard.

The Dynamics control is basically a threshold, sets how sensitive the compressor is (interactive with input volume), When dynamics are completely off, there is no compression and the signal swings into some gnarly saturation.

The mono/stereo switch allows you to send a mono input signal to both outputs, duplicating it, or run both sides separately from a stereo patch cable