A contemporary fusion of the most desired features of legendary Vari-Mu classics. If you want the rich mid-range smoothing compression of an Altec 436C with the fast transient gripping attack of a Fairchild 670 and the unique “Hold” recovery of an RS124 all in one box – the Liverpool is your answer.
Much like its vintage predecessors, this compressor can handle high gain reduction, whilst preserving sound quality without introducing any unwanted artifacts, pumping, or unpleasant distortion. Its forgiving qualities make it almost impossible for the Liverpool to produce bad or destructive results to any source material.
This is the perfect choice for healing even the most damaged and poorly recorded mid-range in instruments and vocals with its incredibly sweet, round, and warm processing. Its lush smoothening effect even at high gain reduction will immerse any track in your mix whilst enriching its mid-range and thickening its low-end.
Its specially designed controls make this one of the most versatile and flexible Vari-Mu designs ever built. You can add grit and character to any source without engaging any dynamic processing, or lush smoothening and fat rounding by dialing in heavy compression.
At the hay day of Vari-Mu compressors, the now revered Altec 436C was an affordable alternative to the Fairchild 670. Its elegant circuit simplicity made it an easily modifiable piece, which engineers around the globe were modifying to suit their own needs.
As a tribute to those engineers from the 60s, the Seattle-based Grove Hill Audio has re-created the original 436C circuit and has modified it with some of the most desirable features and mods over the years for a truly unique tone-shaping beast that is characterful yet not overly colored. The Liverpool may be the last 436C mod you’ll ever need.
We deconstructed one of Grove Hill Audio’s Liverpool compressors, carefully analyzed every single component, and recreated it in a digital form. We used the original blueprints for the hardware to assemble our Liverpool effect emulation and through rigorous testing and fine-tuning we were able to finally create the only true plugin emulation of this unique dynamics processor.
