Ridge Farm Boiler Compressor
Ridge Farm was one of the very best residential studios in the UK up until it’s untimely demise a year or two ago. As is so often the case, the property was worth far more for holiday lets than as a recording studio. Hmmm… Anyway, I’m sure you’ve got a bunch of albums recorded there over the years by artists such as Oasis.
Like most real studios, Frank (the jovial owner) employed great in house tecs, including Pom Le Frog’ Margerand, the whistle-while-you-work electronics genius. One day, he and senior tech Richard were messing about with a circuit based upon the SSL talkback compressor and were taken with the results. ‘Right,’ said Pom, ‘let’s design quelque chose that squashes and crunches signals.’ So they did, and the Ridge Farm Boiler was born.
The unit does something that nothing else will do. It is a vicious little beast, just the trick for making snares or loops nasty and upfront. It’s not subtle, it’s not versatile and it’s not polite. What it is, is nasty. And unique.
You don’t have anything that will do this. The closest is probably the ‘crunch’ mode of an Al Smart C2, but that’ll set you backk three times as much. Borrow one to play with and you’lll know what I mean.
See, hear, feel and try it here or in the comfort of your own room. ~ Eccentric
What the manufacturer says…
The Ridge Farm Industries “Boiler” is a very high quality, all solid state, twin channel ultra limiter-compressor designed to meet the exacting requirements of the audio industry. It will dramatically change your way of recording and mixing drums, percussion, vocals, guitars, bass etc.
It is designed to be quick and easy to use with a minimum of controls. It will provide extremes of compression, creating a characteristic sound with massive presence and pumping, and may also be used to add a variable degree of “dirt” and presence to any mono or stereo audio source. In order to meet professional requirements, the Boiler includes both input and output balanced XLR connections at +4 dBm (TRS).
A Link function will allow you to make the left channel “Master” and the right channel “Slave” for the threshold points, still keeping separate control over the input level controls
Ultra-fast bargraphs will indicate instantaneous output level in actual dBm, whether the bypass is “on” or “off”.
Applications
Drum kit & room mics
Particularly recommended on the insert point of your mixing console where any room mics are, especially when recording drums and percussion. Any decent size room will be enough to make your drums sound very, very big.
Samplers & loops
Use on the output of your samplers or on the channel insert of the sampler return on your mixing console.
Hard disk recording & mixing
Because the Boiler is a vicious limiter you can use it before going into your hard disk system, where maximum level is critical and you do not necessarily want to overload the input.
Vocals
If you aee after extra attack or presence, or purely distortion, the Boiler can provide this.
Bass
If you are lacking a bit of attack and dirt to your bass sound you could put the Boiler on the insert point of the channel you are using before it goes to tape or disk.
(Unless of course you already own a Ridge Farm Industries Gas Cooker mic pre valve pre-amp and DI box, in which case you don’t even need a mixing desk for recording!)
Guitar
The Boiler can be used on the ambience microphone to make the sound of a guitar in a room bigger and fuller.
Specifications
- Max gain 19 dB
- Frequency response 7 Hz – 23 Hz (-1 dB points)
- Input impedance 10k Ohm balanced
- Output impedance 680 Ohm balanced
- Noise at max gain -85 dB (A wtd)
- Crosstalk -70 dB
- Power requirements 100v-240v 50/60 Hz
- Power consumption 8 W
- Dimensions 445 mm (w)
225 mm (d)
40mm (h) - Weight 4.5 Kg