Instead, the Fairchild uses a form of ultra-wide knee, so that the ratio effectively becomes harder the more you work the compressor. The most notable omission is the lack of the traditional ratio control you’d expect to find on a VCA or FET compressor. The new Fairchild Tube Limiter Plug-in Collection actually comes as two plug-ins: the ‘refreshed’ Fairchild 670 and the new ‘mono’ Fairchild 660, available for both mono and stereo operation.Īs well as demonstrating a completely revised approach to modelling, the new Fairchild plug-ins include additional controls, taking them well above and beyond the scope of both the original hardware and software versions.Īs you’d expect from a variable-mu compressor, the controls on the Fairchild 670 aren’t entirely conventional. ’Child of our Time Having seen updates to the Urei 1176 and LA-2A plug-ins, it seemed only a matter of time before Universal Audio turned its attention to its venerable Fairchild compressor. However, for those of us who can’t afford such an extravagant outlay, there’s always been the option of using Universal Audio’s excellent Fairchild 670 plug-in, which has been a mainstay of the UAD platform since 2004.

Certainly, the few engineers out there who have been lucky to use an original Fairchild 670 will wax lyrical about its unique sound and how its 20 valves impart a highly musical form of gain control.

Whether or not the current value of a Fairchild 670 (somewhere around the £30,000 mark at the time of writing) is testament to its audio quality or its apparent scarcity is hard to determine.

Uad fairchild 670