Crane Song Trakker
Crane Song's latest offering is the Trakker, a compressor/limiter designed for versatility. DAVID MARTIN has the review.
Open up any catalog or trade magazine, or just stroll down the aisles at an AES show, and you'll find a plethora of compressors designed around electro-optical elements, VCAs and Variable-Mu circuits. These compressors/limiters come with discrete, tube and hybrid amplifier stages, and are finished, it seems, in every color imaginable. Some manufacturers target the latest marketing fad (it has a tube in it), some attempt to clone a classic piece of gear (the transformers are wound to the same specs as the original), and still others apparently build their boxes with a combination of mysticism and marketing (though I still don't understand what 'phat' means).
The Crane Song Trakker is none of those things however. In a single rack space, Crane Song designer Dave Hill has come up with an extremely versatile compressor with a wide range of sounds.
The Layout
The Trakker is a single-channel, discrete, Class-A compressor/ limiter, with transformerless balanced I/O. The rear panel has an IEC power connector, analog input and output on XLR, and a 15-pin DB-style connector, which is used to link multiple Trakkers. There's also a massive aluminum heat sink attached to the back of the Trakker, bringing the total depth of the unit to 12 inches. A male DB-9 connector is used for the sidechain insert. If the sidechain connector is used, the I/O must be normalled back to the unit. If the connector is not used, the insert is disabled.
The front panel offers adjustments for threshold, attack, release, knee shape and make-up gain controls, plus a switch labeled 'character'. Threshold, attack, release and knee shape are interactive. For instance, changing the knee shape from gentle to steep may require that you change the threshold; a hard knee may require a higher threshold than a soft knee. In addition, the slope of the knee changes the attack and release times -- the steeper the slope, the faster the attack and release.
The character control is a 16-position switch, which allows you to choose from four basic types of compressor/limiter -- optical, air-optical, soft knee and hard knee. You may also choose from four types of amplifier/modulation sounds -- transparent, vintage, transparent with VCA artifacts and vintage with VCA artifacts. The optical settings are program-dependent. Increasing the release time on the compressor will increase the effect. The air-optical setting is similar to the optical setting, but with a high-frequency effect also found in certain vintage tube compressors. The soft knee settings provide a classic soft characteristic similar to many tube and solid state feedback type compressors. The hard knee can be thought of as a limiter even though the Trakker has adjustable attack and release times. The knee control changes the ratio when operating in the hard knee mode.
There is a 22-segment LED meter, which can be switched between gain reduction and output, a hard-wired bypass switch and a link switch. The gain control offers up to 14dB of make-up gain.
Up to eight Trakkers can be linked, with one master unit and up to seven slave units. In the link mode, the master controls every function of the slaves except gain control. Independent gain controls allow you to balance the output level of each unit, while letting the master unit control all of the other parameters. If you've spent much time trying to tweak all of the parameters of most 'linkable' stereo compressors to make them match, you will appreciate this feature; and those looking for bus compressors for their 5.1 mixes will be even more appreciative.
In Use
The Crane Song Trakker is a very neat unit; it has an endless variety of sounds available, from transparent to aggressive. I could consistently find an appropriate setting by adjusting the attack, release and knee controls to the middle of their range and switching through the 'character' settings until I found something close to what I needed. I would then tweak the other controls until I was happy with the sound. When the signal was below threshold (so that no compressions were taking place), I couldn't hear any change in the signals passing through the unit no matter what character setting I chose -- the different tones only appeared when the signal exceeded threshold.
As a multi-channel bus limiter, the capabilities of the Trakker are pretty amazing. While I only used it on a stereo bus (a consequence of having only two Trakkers and not five), the imaging was rock solid and the sound was pristine. (Unless I was aiming for something nastier -- it can do that, too.)
The only peculiarity I noticed with the Trakker in two months of use was that the 'Soft Start' function of my balanced power transformer would freeze the unit when I powered up the studio in the morning. Simply turning the Trakker off and then on again cleared up the problem.
The Crane Song Trakker truly is versatile -- its tone shaping possibilities are virtually unlimited, and its linking abilities are unmatched. I guess the world could use another compressor, as long as it's a compressor like the Trakker.