Outboard Audio has introduced a new a studio compressor built around four voicings and four directions. Outboard-C is designed to be precise when the mix needs surgery, and musical when it needs to glue.
A continuous Auto-Threshold servo rides the gain reduction toward a musical target, Headroom trims the whole engine colder or hotter, and the ballistics are calibrated so the knob value is the measured attack and release time. A complete sidechain section — detector tone, an 8-band sidechain EQ, stereo linking — makes ducking and frequency-aware triggering native, not a workaround.
Classic and Optical switch the detector to a feedback topology for a smoother, self-limiting response; Clean is a neutral feed-forward compressor for mix bus and mastering work; Vocal is tuned for voice. Attack and Release are calibrated to measured 10%–90% gain-reduction transition times rather than a textbook time constant.
Auto-Threshold is a continuous servo that rides the threshold so the average gain reduction settles on a target, independent of input level, with a silence gate. A bipolar Headroom control trims the whole signal path colder or hotter at a compensated output level. The Shape stage adds antiderivative-anti-aliased saturation with up to 32x oversampling.
The sidechain section includes an external sidechain input with a listen mode, stereo linking (L/R or M/S, including a max-linked variant), a four-band tone control that shapes only what the detector hears, and a fully parametric 8-band EQ for the detector signal with per-band type, slope, frequency, gain, Q and solo.
76 factory presets are included across ten categories, with machine-wide synced favorites and A/B compare between two complete plugin states.
Outboard-C for Windows and Mac (VST3, AU and CLAP) is priced €65 EUR, with a 14-day trial available to try the plugin.
More information: Outboard Audio