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Black Ion 76
A faithful FET limiting amplifier — the classic '76 input-driven compression character, built around a bespoke nonlinear FET gain element, then extended with the controls that class of hardware never had. Ratio emerges from real feedback loop. Four discrete ratios plus All-Buttons-In, sidechain filtering, parallel Comp Mix, up to 16× oversampling and Mid-Side detection.
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Compression you can drive
Black Ion 76 is built around a bespoke nonlinear FET gain element, and everything you hear comes out of how that element actually behaves. Ratio emerges from real feedback loop gain the way the original circuit does, rather than from a feed-forward approximation — so the compression tightens and loosens with the programme instead of tracking a curve. Push it and the distortion rises with it, second-harmonic dominant, from 0.2% at rest to around 5% when it is working hard. The colour arrives because you drove it there, not from a saturation stage bolted on afterwards. That behaviour is not tuned by ear and left alone: it is modelled against a validated reference and held to it by an automated parity check on every single build.
True feedback topology
ratio from loop gain
Ratio emerges from real loop gain the way the original circuit does, not a feed-forward approximation. Modelled against a validated Python reference and held to it by an automated parity check on every build.
Nonlinear FET grit
2nd-harmonic dominant
A bespoke FET gain element with THD rising from 0.2% to 5% as drive and gain reduction increase — the colour arrives because you pushed it, not from a static saturation stage.
Four ratios, plus Nuke
4:1 · 8:1 · 12:1 · 20:1
All-Buttons-In with a continuous blend between the single-ratio and all-buttons response, so the famous mode is a place you can arrive at gradually.
The modern controls it never had
Advanced parameters
Sidechain HPF, Comp Mix parallel compression with no routing, post HPF/LPF, Auto Makeup, and an Iron transformer-drive control.
Oversampling to 16×
1× / 2× / 4× / 8× / 16×
Defaults to 2×. About 1.0% of one CPU core per instance there — AVX2-optimised with minimax-polynomial transcendentals in the oversampled hot loop.
System requirements
- Format
- VST3, Standalone
- System
- Windows 10 or 11, 64-bit
- CPU
- AVX2 required
- Detection
- Stereo, Dual-Mono, Mid-Side
- Latency
- None at 1×; oversampling reported to host
- MacOS/AU
- In progress
Changelog
- 1.2.0
The biggest maintenance release Black Ion 76 has had. Nothing about the sound of the compressor itself has changed — every setting still does exactly what it did — but a lot of things around it are now correct that were not.
If you run several instances, you should notice this one
An instance sitting on a silent or muted track used to cost almost as much CPU as one working hard. It now costs almost nothing. On a big session with the plugin parked on tracks that are not playing, that is a substantial saving.