joemeek et tfpro

A SHORT HISTORY OF Ted’s Optical Compressors.
SC2
The first stereo optical compressor was designed in 1993 as a result of a little project to make a ‘travel video’; I did not have a nice sounding compressor in my roomful of old recording gear, so it seemed like a good idea to see if some of those old designs of the 60s still had any merit……. The result was a few days intensive development and using some modern ways to approach old problems, I came up with a stereo compressor that had the ‘weight’ and ‘urgency’ of those old Fairchild units, but in a stereo form.
The story about the colour is true….. I was about to take a prototype to a London Studio and it was housed in a nasty looking aluminium chassis. It was late in the day and I drove into Newton Abbot to a car accessory store to buy some spray paint. I asked for something really hard and durable but quick drying, the disinterested assistant reached behind him and handed me a can of bright green ‘Hammerite’…….. Everyone hated it, but it stuck!

The first production compressors, a batch of 50, were made with beautiful machined front panels, finished in the hideous green and each one lovingly hand wired. I still have 2 of the originals… both working.
Those front panels turned out to be ruinously expensive; they were painted by a coachbuilder, rubbed down between each of 6 coats of paint.

The second batch, introduced late in 1994 were called SC2 V1.02 and had more conventional front panels. They were still hand wired, and small modifications were made during 95 and 96.
The SC2 V1.05 was introduced in December 1995 and the V1.07; the last version using an input PC board and a separate compress/output PC board was introduced in 1996 and was current until mid 1998.

EARLY PERFORMANCE
I made the first compressors specifically to work as volume compressors for complete music tracks. They were slow in operation, but had the attack and release curves that gave a lift to almost any music.
Most of those early SC2s went to studios in the USA where they were suddenly very popular as drum sub-group compressors.

SC2.2
The JoeMeek brand was starting to do very well by mid 1998 and the demand for the SC2 kept rising. To improve the reliability and repeatability, I re-designed the inside of the SC2 using a single printed circuit board and started to use a superior pot type (Alpha pots rather than the awful ‘Omeg’ types), and better switches: Any stories about the quality of production dropping at that time are totally false, the reliability improved and apart from some disastrous shipping problems where many mic amps arrived in the US smashed, the product quality was very good.

The circuit design of the SC2.2 was kept as closely as possible to the earlier SC2. I extended the range of the attack and release controls and added a stereo output gain control and a balance control.
Operationally, the 2.2 was certainly not as easy to use as the original SC2, where it was impossible to make it sound bad! However, the 2.2 did become one of the most popular pieces of outboard gear of the time.

DIGITAL
Early in 1998 I designed a version of the SC2.2 with an integrated digital board. The digital circuitry was designed by my old friend Steve Dove. We made a prototype run of these compressors…. Called the SC3, but they were not popular and were superseded by the SC4 (October 1998), a similar design but with a plug-in digital board.
These compressors both retained the sound of the early SC2. I designed them as ‘end of the chain’ compressors in a mastering set-up, but they did not achieve much favour…. Most engineers wanted the conventional SC2.2

M/S
Both the later SC2.2 and the SC4 made use of M/S matrix techniques…. This is changing the ‘left and right’ into ‘sum and difference (M/S)’ and then compressing the signals before converting back into ‘left and right’. The huge advantage is that even under the heaviest of compression, the image stays constant, with no drifting of the centre. A secondary, but equally important advantage is that it allows the use of a ‘width’ control; wonderful for controlling the stereo image.
These compressors continued in production until 2001 when, following ‘9-11’, the equipment market in the USA stopped completely.
Commercial pressures meant that we had to close the JoeMeek company and the trademark was bought by the US distributor PMI.
PMI made the decision that all the old designs were out-of-date, and they introduced a complete range of very efficient, but not too exciting versions using the old product numbers, made in China.

TFPRO
In 2003 I introduced the first of the new TFPRO compressors, the P8. This was a new design based on 1960s principles but using a later type of optical device than on the SC2….. My own research showed that I could achieve the exact performance of the SC2 with these later devices, and also emulate some other compressors at the same time.
The P8 was a development project and few were made, but it quickly converted from it’s fire-engine red, with a single meter, to the P38, a much more refined two-tone blue with twin meters and classy aluminium knobs.

The P38, still in production and doing very well indeed, has become the classic optical compressor with the heart of the old 60s designs but with enough control so that it can perform many compression functions.
It might be a slight pity that the original ‘turn the knob and it works’ attitude has gone, but the P38 is still remarkably easy to use, and quite difficult to get wrong.

With the increased sophistication of mastering set-ups, I began to get a number of calls asking for additional facility…. Specifically side-chain access and ‘partial compression’.
The first was easy, that was just adding a little circuitry and a couple of sockets.
‘Partial compression’ is surprisingly more difficult as it involves a separate mixer stage. I looked at this possibility, redesigned the printed circuit board and produced the ‘extra’ version….. the P38EX

In terms of performance, the P38 and EX version are versatile in the extreme.
The new tfpro compressors use the same optical principle as the earlier Joemeek compressors, but with a very much faster operating optical device.... which I slow down electronically to get the same performance as the earlier ones. In addition, I use a separate parallel optical system to drive the compression meter, unlike the JM units, and also some radical work in the circuitry to get the extreme variable ratio, something that was impossible a few years ago.
The P38EX when switched to 'Greenbox' and the ratio set at about 5:1, with mid to long attack and fairly short release is a fine example of a compressor identical to the old SC2, yet with a cleanness that would not have been possible with old gear.

©2009Ted Fletcher
Ted Fletcher

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