The bolsterisers hark from a time before compression as we now know it. A long-obscure English experimentalist engineer and gentleman scientist by the name of Edwin Pierfax III derived his naive design of the original bolsteriser during a nap on the lawn with his cat Tiswold.
He is said to have announced one day during afternoon-tea that he had “found a method to aid in the bolsterising of signals to an extent most satisfactory”.
Fast-forward nearly ninety years and the bolsterisers are reborn in digital form. After various component-level tests, it was decided to power-up the devices and take some measurements with a view to recreating these fantasy beasts in software – and here they are in their equally naive digital implementations.
In their day, there was no working language of audio compression, so some of the terminology associated with the bolsterisers is a little out of keeping with the modern production lexicon. Today, the devices would be characterised roughly as follows :
- Rev (A) – Softknee RMS Compressor
- Rev (B) – Hardknee Peak Compressor
- Rev © – Hardknee Booster
- Rev (D) – Softknee Booster
Free MONO versions are available for download. Stereo versions cost £15 each. But there is also a group buy offer available.
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