Drawmer 1978

Must have it

After checking out the demos I decided to order one...what a great unit, with quality workmanship, and awesome sound...just great unit all around

Very Good!

It's a very good professional compressor! is recommended for sure!

Long story short

I bought my first 1978 about half year ago. Compressor section was too clean for my taste . So i bought an SSL and sold my Drawmer. First time i was happy with it but after a few weeks of hard work on studio every day i started to realise how much i underestimated my Drawmer. I opened some projects which i mixed/mastered by Drawmer and realised that i can't reach this sound with my SSL.

So i had to by it again.

I need to say, that compressor section is still too colorless for itself (on my taste), but with proper use of shaping tool it becomes sooooo much better. Character section allows it to be as much versatile as possible but in 97% of my cases it's only linear release curve (lin, button ON) and unlinked channels (wide button ON).

Saturation section is handy in 90% of cases and only on 5-15% of knob. I wish it would be more settings for this section but for this price you can only dream about it. This "saturation" is more a soft-clipper but sometimes it becomes an awful

distortion that you can't use for mastering (but you can for drum bus or whatever bus).

Great value for the money.

Pretty good compressor with fet coloring and saturation stage. I used it as main bus compressor for a few months and can say that this thing is extremely versatile, from hip-hop to acoustic ballads it sounds awesome. Tone shaping function is pretty good thing but to my ears it doesn't work like usual sidechain filter, sometimes it works great, sometimes it makes sound too colored and boomy (for the low freq) so be careful with the knobs and add the level slightly from the zero point. Overall if you want classic "HP SC filter sound" you need to think about external sc. The only one thing that disappointed me is that to my ears it's not the best compressor for the vocal, 1176 plug-in from uad did this job better.

Great all rounder for smaller studios

I give it four stars for handling because the power switch is located on the rear of the unit, meaning when it's in the rack between other equipment, you cannot switch it on/off easily (I am not in the studio every day so switch equipment off when I'm away).

Other than that, I quite enjoy that there is no recall (really forces you to listen and adjust accordingly, rather than flipping through presets). It does require some jack-XLR adapters to be purchased if used with a patchbay (which is the case with me) so I would have preferred the connections to be TRS on the rear but this is just a minor complaint.

Sound is great, didn't find myself using the saturation feature on bus mixdowns (but sometimes on single-track compression/mixing yes) and the two band tone-shaping seems a bit limited to me (I would have liked the option of subtractive EQing too), but again I haven't found it to be a major issue.