BELLARI RP583 Studio Dual Tube Compressor Limiter MINT

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it was used for 2 months and that`s it...it works with 110v but for european buyers i will give a 220v to 110v converter bonusThis item is in a mint condition This new dual-channel compressor combines valve circuitry with an opto-compressor design. But does it give the best or the worst of both worlds? Paul White Photos: Mike Cameron Outwardly, the Bellari RP583 looks like a very standard two-channel compressor. Its brushed-gold, 2U front panel sports the familiar Output Level, Threshold, Ratio, Attack and Release controls for each channel, there are two moving-coil meters (that can be switched to read gain reduction or output level), and there's a Link button for compressing stereo signals. Each channel has its own bypass button and there's an illuminated rocker-style power switch.A glance around the back confirms that life is pretty ordinary there too, except that the mains comes in via a captive cable rather than an IEC connector. There's balanced I/O on XLRs plus unbalanced I/O on quarter-inch jacks, with two further jacks per channel providing an insert point for the side-chain and also allowing the compressor to be triggered from an outside source — to produce ducking effects, for example. The construction is tidy and proficient without being overly fancy, and the use of large knobs and clear legending will be welcomed in dimly lit studios.While the outside might suggest a very ordinary compressor, the circuitry reveals a number of 'classic' ingredients, specifically an optical gain-control element, that's used within a tube circuit with the aim of providing smooth and musical gain control rather than clinical accuracy. Each channel includes a 7025 dual-triode tube, where the opto circuit comes between the two tube stages.The quoted frequency response for the unit is a healthy 20Hz-40kHz, where the balanced input impedance is 10k(omega) and the unbalanced a rather high 1M(omega), which means you could plug guitars and basses directly into the jack input without getting an impedance mismatch. The signal-to-noise ratio is 90dB, and the value for total distortion plus noise is less than 0.1 percent under typical operating conditions. In use, no additional noise was evident when using this unit, other than where the act of compression brought up noise already present in the input signal. Getting To Grips With The Controls There's no in-depth explanation of the characteristics of this compressor — indeed, the manual comprises little more than a couple of lines covering each of the controls — but given that the gain control circuit is optical it's probably also somewhat nonlinear, which is what gives optical compressors their unique character. Once the channel is active, Threshold sets the level above which compression will take place, while the Output Level control is used to make up any gain lost due to the compression process. Ratio works in the usual way by determining how many decibels the input needs to rise in order to achieve a 1dB rise in output, but if, as I suspect, the opto-compressor has a somewhat soft-knee characteristic, then this will only be approximate. The Attack and Release controls set the time the compressor takes to respond and the time the gain takes to return to normal after the signal has fallen back below the threshold level, so there's nothing out of the ordinary there.The Link switch combines the side-chain signals and puts both channels under the control of the lower channel's knobs (other than the output gains, which remain independent) so that the same amount of gain reduction will be applied to both channels even if the signals passing through them differ (as they do when the source is stereo). This prevents the stereo image shifts that occur when stereo signals are processed via independent compressors.Inserting an equaliser into the side-chain makes the compressor frequency selective, which can be useful for setting up simple de-essing or de-popping, or ... read more

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