BFD for compression?

[basementjack]

Hey everyone,

This Question might be a little off topic, but hopefully close enough...

is there a cheap behringer product out there that can do some audio compression and crossover?

I'll give some background...

I have a bunch of bass shakers in my HT.
Right now they are driven off the subwoofer (LFE) out of my preamp.
because the LFE is controlled by the volume of the system (just like LRC and surrounds) the amound of shake I get varies - if my system is cranked - they shake too much, if the system is low, I can't feel them.

I susect theres some piece of gear for musicians or recording studios that could tame this a bit - causing the louder parts to be quieter and the quieter parts to be louder.

Does this exists?

A side use would be to limit the Freq range going to the shakers - so I could feed it a 20-100hz signal, but using internal eq, it would only shake based on 20-60.

Any thoughts?

- Jack

[thxgoon]

Here's one option.

Compressors are widely used in pro audio and you should be able to find several at a local guitar center. Band limited compressors do exist though they are a bit more expensive. There is no way to compress a signal inside of a BFD that I know of though you could use one channel of it to restrict the fr to 20-60 then use a cheap compressor.

Compressors have gains at both the input side and the ouput side. So you can artificially boost the input for greater compression and then set the ouput side to a level you like. It would take some tweaking I think to get a single setting that would work well at all volumes as the net effect would be the same intensity of shaking at higher volumes. I'd be interested to hear your results if you try it.

[Wayne A. Pflughaupt]

I was going to recommend the same compressor. It’s probably one of the better budget compressors out there. Don’t know of any compressor/crossover, though, at least not a cheap one. You might try trolling around some of the pro audio manufacturer’s sites – Alesis, Presonus, dbx, Ashly, Phonic, Rane, etc.


Regards,
Wayne

[Danny]

you could try the dbx 166xl