I was delightfully surprised when I happened upon the new 1029 Stereo VCA Compressor from AEA. Isn’t the company best known for its great collection of ribbon mics? AEA’s incredible mics are a 21st century studio standard. My partners and I have eight of their ribbons living in our mic closet right now. If you’ve been paying attention, you also know that AEA makes an incredible set of mic preamps with features specifically targeting the needs of ribbon junkies like me. My studio currently has four channels of the AEA RPQs [Tape Op #73] in our patchbay. I’m a big fan of AEA’s entire toolkit, and I was intrigued to hear what they had cooked up for their latest adventure: Not a mic, not a preamp, but a VCA-based stereo compressor!
I made a home for the half-rack sized 1029 in my patchbay, just below my RPQ so that both preamp outputs normal directly into the compressor’s inputs. The first session I tested it out on featured Thomas Pridgen playing drums. I placed a spaced pair of AEA 44C mics as low to the floor as I could, about 10 feet in front of the kick drum, and patched into the inputs of my “AEA channel strip.” I often use this mic setup on drums, especially for heavy hitters like Pridgen. I get a nice roomy kick/snare sound with plenty of toms, but without the drums being overly masked by the cymbals. I used the low shelf on the RPQ to attenuate some of the boomy subs and felt happy. It was time to test out the compressor. The 1029 has a continuously variable ratio from 1:1 up to “Limit,” which I assume is up around 20:1. I set the knob to 6:1 and brought the Threshold down. It’s very clean with just enough weight to feel heavy. There are three speed settings: Peak Fast (4 ms attack and 17 ms release) felt like a wonderful squash; RMS (12 ms attack and 50 ms release) felt the most transparent; and Peak Slow (4 ms Attack and 200 ms release) was the most exciting for the tempo Pridgen was playing. After getting the room mic super squashed, I dialed the Dry/Wet knob all way back to Dry and tested the bypass switch. It sounded clean to me, so then I slowly brought the Dry/Wet knob back to about 70%. This felt like a perfect balance of exciting squash with just enough clean transient left in the mix. When I turned off the solo button and heard the full drum mix, it was obvious that this track was the most exciting part of the whole drum sound.
The 1029 really is a wonderful complement to AEAs preamps; it’s got that same high energy – clean but with heft – that I’ve come to expect from them. Perhaps it’s the custom Fred Forssell-designed op-amps? It’s surprisingly lightweight, considering its heavy sound. The meters are fast and easy to read. I don’t love that it’s got an external power supply, but at this price I’ll gladly overlook that. It sounds excellent, is easy to use, and feels like a great addition to any studio.