Dave Hill Designs’ Titan is a hardware compressor that does a superb job of transparently controlling dynamic range, but it also gives you a broad palette of tasty coloration options. A digitally controlled analog feedback compressor with two types of VCAs plus a crossfade, the Titan equips your studio with a huge spectrum of color and control choices. Use the crossfade to blend between squeaky-clean and ultra-colored compression. The Titan’s stepped controls and color LCD display let you easily recall your settings from previous sessions.
The Titan gives you all the controls you’d expect in a high-end hardware compressor, but there are also several unique controls onboard. VCA Color lets you move between a very clean pulse-width modulation gain-control device and a vintage gain-control element. Parallel Mix serves up parallel compression, letting you blend your unprocessed and compressed audio. Dynamic Color generates harmonic content of an opposite nature to that served up by a vintage gain control, imparting meaty mass to the signal. Lastly, the Fat/Air switch lets you enhance your sound with palpable girth or a delicate sense of space.
If a definitive hardware compressor — with serious coloration mojo — is on your studio shopping list for 2012, Dave Hill Designs’ Titan certainly deserves your consideration.