CompStortion Distortion modes don't do anything

[bobbriessinck]

Not sure if this is a feature or a troubleshooting topic, bit of both?
I’ve noticed that cycling through the distortion settings on the Compstortion doesn’t do anything. I put it do the test and it seems that I’m right. I compared it to the normal, yellow and red settings of an early 2000s EL8X and that one clearly shows harmonic distortion changes between settings. I’ve attached screenshots of a 1kHz sine going through an analog Distressor EL8X from the early 2000s.

Signal chain: Sinewave → Channel → Insert IO Surface XLR Analogue level → Internal Comp → EQ screen → direct out to Pro Tools with ProQ4. Obviously when testing the insert is bypass and the compressor engaged, vice versa…

The 4 distortion settings of the Compstortion don’t do anything. Either this is poor programming and it’s more a scam than a feature, or it is a poorly tested software version with a huge bug.

Below a google drive link to all screenshots (cycling through all settings) as well as a video.

*Edit: the pictures didn’t upload in the correct order. 1 is the Compstortion doing 6dB of compression on the exact same settings as the analog distressor, with distortion D activated. 2 is the dLive screen of this setting. 3 is the actual EL8X and its harmonics, 4 is the send without the EL8X nor the compstortion.

P.S. A couple of years ago I did a similar comparison sending 1kHz sines to all the dLive DEEP emulations and some were okay, some didn’t do anything. Shockingly the Peak stock compressor had way more harmonics than the emulations, the RMS stock compressor was 100% clean. I’ve always found the Pk compressor very cramped sounding that that explained why. If there’s interest I can upload those results as well.

Distressor dlive comparison - Google Drive

[Austin]

try the test again but lower the attack and release values and get the gain reduction into the orange/red, you will see differences. I think A-B are the same but two different approach vectors, same for C-D. If you play with the input knob, you will see what I mean: They add the same type of harmonics differently depending on the input level.

[bobbriessinck]

I’ll play around with it a little more but attack and release doesn’t do much to a static sine wave, whereas a real EL8X has more harmonics just by doing nothing, and at the same compression level does different things harmonically depending on the distortion setting. This has identical harmonic distortions on 4 different settings. In essence it has the UI of a distressor with hopefully the same attack and release settings and a pinch of distortion.

I’ll maybe even do a plugin doctor comparison, see what the attack/release/knee differences are… It’s a cool toy, don’t get me wrong, but I am not impressed with the emulation.

Just like that the Opto compressor has 0 harmonics last time I checked…

[J_McRib]

Just did my own tests using OpenSoundMeter. It definitely seems like something isn’t working the way it should. The level of the harmonics will seemingly change with input, output, attack, and release controls, but the distortion modes have little to no effect in most tests.

Below, you can see my screenshots demonstrating distortion characteristics and the settings I used to get those results:

Input: 10, Attack: 5, Release: 5, Output: 3.75, Distortion D, 20dB Reduction

Input: 10, Attack: 5, Release: 5, Output: 3.75, Distortion C, 20dB Reduction

Input: 10, Attack: 5, Release: 5, Output: 3.75, Distortion B, 20dB Reduction

Input: 10, Attack: 5, Release: 5, Output: 3.75, Distortion A, 20dB Reduction

Input: 10, Attack: 5, Release: 5, Output: 3.75, No Distortion, 20dB Reduction

According to the firmware reference guide:

The Distortion modes go from least to most aggressive, with each one emphasising something slightly different.

Mode A Emphasises 2nd order Harmonic distortion.

Mode B A more aggressive version of Mode A at lower levels of Gain Reduction.

Mode C Emphasises 3rd order Harmonic distortion.

Mode D A more aggressive version of Mode C at lower levels of Gain Reduction.

I get that harmonic distortion is often subtle, but it doesn’t seem right that we don’t observe any change between B and C. I’d at least expect the harmonics to shift between A/B and C/D. D we can see things go crazy, so something is happening at a certain point.