Rupert Neve Designs 543 Mono Compressor / Limiter

The 543 Mono Compressor delivers the unobtrusive, musical-sounding dynamic control and brick-wall limiting made famous in the Portico 5043 to the 500 series format. The 543 features a fully controllable compressor-limiter with feed-forward / feedback modes, Peak / RMS detection and a built in side chain high pass filter.

With an unrivaled heritage and a tremendous feature set, the 543 yields a combination of rich warmth, flexibility and precision that is sure to resonate in the ears of sound engineers the world over.

Built around Mr. Rupert Neve’s custom transformer designs, each 543 module encompasses individually controllable threshold, attack, release, makeup gain, ratio, side chain HPF, Feed-Forward / Feed-back selection and Peak/RMS detection modes.

With the compressor inactive, the 543 may be used as a transformer-coupled, high-performance line amplifier, and two 543 may be linked for stereo operation as well. The chassis is built to standard 500 series specifications, with power and I/O provided by the rack.

• Single-channel, transformer-coupled compressor housed in a 500 Series module
• A gain range of -6 dB to +20 dB allows for compensating for any signal loss due to compression
• When the Peak switch is engaged, the compressor uses a combination of peak and RMS (average) detection to determine level when disengaged, it follows RMS levels
• A switchable 250 Hz High-Pass Filter can be applied to the VCA side chain signal, allowing the compressor circuit to disregard sustained low-frequency content
• With the Link switch engaged on two 543 modules and controls set approximately to the same values, Gain reduction on both channels will be the same, preserving stereo balance and position function is available either on “link-buss” enabled 500 Series racks, or by hard-wiring the two “link-busses” in non-compatible racks
• When the Link switch is engaged on two connected 543 modules, ducking of one source is possible
• Two peak LED meters display output level and gain reduction