Input stage

While the days of -10dBV Unbalanced connections on audio interfaces are largely behind us,
different audio Interfaces have different (or selectable) output levels, most often 0dBU = -18dBFS, -
20dBFS, -22dBFS. This could be stated alternatively to say
“When an analogue signal reaches 0dBFS it is +18dBU in
level (or +20, +22 etc). Analogue equipment typically has
the capacity to handle hotter levels than this before the
circuit starts to distort so lining up the output of your audio
interface with the Input Trim of Fusion allows you to dial in
an appropriate amount of “crunch” while still keeping
headroom – Fusion happily can handle signals >27dBu
without problems.

After the SuperAnalogue input trim we have the the high

pass filter which uses a stepped control with discrete
resistor values. A swept control is very useful for some
parameters, and key to dialing in certain effects, however
the Left/Right tracking of fixed steps is a little more defined
than a variable pot inherently has due to differences in the
pot wafers. As the HPF sits at the very start of the signal path we felt it would be better to have the
signal as coherent as possible before further processing.

We start our signal into the Fusion super-clean, but we then get the opportunity to dirty it up a bit.

Vintage Drive
The first colouration circuit we’re going to look at is the Vintage Drive. This is a brand new design, it’s
not the VHD mic pre circuit. To understand what it does
we’d like to take you through some gentle theory about
how amplifiers hard clip and soft clip. Here is a diagram
that shows the operating range of an ‘ideal’ amplifier
circuit. The black line shows a circuit that is completely
linear (in other words it’s completely transparent) right
until it reaches the maximum and minimum operating
levels (the red lines), at which point it ‘hard clips’. This
will give you lots of distortion. So in real words, we start
off clean, add more gain and stay just as clean, dial in more gain and I’m still clean, dial in more gain
and it’s all crap.

In the real world, amplifiers don’t work like this. As you

approach the minimum and maximum operating levels, the
circuit starts to react in a non-linear way – a bit like a ‘soft
knee’ on a compressor.

Instead of being “clean, clean, clean, crap” we often get an

extra stage of “mojo” before the amplifier circuit craps out
into distortion.
In the SuperAnalogue design philosophy we don’t want any “crap” or any “mojo” – we just want
“what goes in comes out. So we design as though the operating range of the amplifier is between
these two dashed lines (in circuit terms we
pretend that the hard clip points would be
‘here’ and not in the red areas). We use
components that have an over-specified
linear range, so at this top dashed line
we’re well above usual pro-audio signal
voltages (in this case around +27dBu so up
to 9dBu hotter than an “average” level at
0dBFS from your Audio interface!). This means that other devices in the signal path will be pushed
into distortion at far earlier levels than our SuperAnalogue devices. This suits the SuperAnalogue
philosophy; ‘what goes in comes out uncoloured by our bit of the signal path but keeping all the
colours added by other bits intact.

However, what we do with vintage drive is a bit of a half-way house; we include some of this ‘non-
linear’ region in the operating range – enough so that we
get a really nice soft clipping affect as we start to drive it,
but not so much that it hard clips. The operating range of
the unit is just less than the hard clip point. It is only in the
most unlikely of circumstances that you can cross this
virtual line and move in to hard clipping in the Vintage Drive
circuit. However by that point you will certainly be hearing
it! This is what gives Fusion it’s first injection of analogue
mojo.

This helps get the balance of soft clipping right, and most importantly ‘variable’. However too many
variables make something slow to use. We wanted Fusion to be fast to dial sounds in, the opposite
of plug-ins if you will. To do this we had to restrict some of the accessible variables in the circuit and
that meant we had to dial them in for you in ways that would give the most useable range of effect
over the most sensible range of gains. As such there were a number of tweakable parameters under
the hood of Vintage Drive in the prototype stages while we, and a core group of mix engineers, sat in
on a number of listening tests to give opinions about what the “magic settings” were.

The user adjustable bits of the circuit have two controls; the Drive which controls the amount of
colour we’re adding, and the Density which adjusts the tone.

The Drive control relates to two amplifier circuits which are

inversely linked. As you turn up the gain in the first amplifier
it turns down the gain on the output amplifier. This is to try
and keep levels as consistent as possible through the unit.

As you decrease the drive control, the input gain is lowered

and the output gain is brought up. This means at lower
‘drive’ levels, you bring up the noise floor. To combat this,
use higher drive settings, and lower the SuperAnalogue
input trim.
Density = “mojo”

At the minimum Density setting the unit actually acts as

an Expander. This increases the dynamic range between
the transients and the rest of the signal, “opening up”
the sound – a cool trick for over-limited masters!

At low to middle Density settings, Vintage Drive adds

subtle 2nd Order harmonics that enhance the transients
or ‘attack’ of the mix. This is done by overloading an
oldschool transconductance amplifier, so the effect is
level dependent; the hotter the input, the more harmonic saturation is generated. High density
setting move the signal towards the edges of the operational range of the amplifier circuit and it
adds a kind of “soft compression”, similar to finding the
sweet spot when driving a vintage analogue desk. This
works by driving the transconductance amp at a much
lower level, whilst also overloading the pre-amp
feedback path into the soft-clipping region.

As mentioned, parts of this circuit are noisy –

combinations of low drive and high density can increase
the noise level of the output of the circuit. If this is
audible then use the Input Trim to lower the level of the
signal hitting the Harmonic Drive circuit and use the Drive control to increase the gain to the point
where the same sound effect is heard but with lower noise.

So with that in mind, let’s have a listen.

As we need to push into the non-linear region for the effect,

Vintage Drive adds a bit of gain to the overall mix when switched in, so it’s important to use the
output trim and the master bypass to get roughly the same metering level. We’re confident in the
sonic ability of vintage drive, so your customer should hear an improvement when switching Fusion
in and out of circuit, without a jump in level. We recommend you should use the master bypass for
demonstrating Vintage drive, not the ‘in’ switch.