VCA designed the SL473 Compressor, Limiter, and Expander plugin based on the Danner Cassettes type module, the Neumann U473 Black. The Neumann U473 analog model was created from the 1970s until Neumann discontinued making analog mixing consoles in the early 1990s, and it was the most popular limiter for “cutting” records in the vinyl era. It’s known for its clean and transparent compression, so you may fully compress the typeface without the usual side effects.

This compressor, like the original hardware, has a minor learning curve, according to the developer. However, if you understand how this compressor works, you’ll see how it manages dynamics in a very musical manner.

The yellow knobs on the left side of the GUI control the expander; the expander can be activated with the ‘On Expander’ switch, and you have the ‘Recovery’ and ‘Threshold’ knobs (with respect to Attack and Ratio these are fixed).

The black and red knobs control the Compressor and Limiter, respectively. The durations of ‘Attack’ (0.25 – 2.5 – 25 ms), ‘Recovery’ (0.1 to 10s and Automatic mode), ‘Ratio’ (red knob that, when adjusted in LIM, works as a Limiter), ‘Compr Gain’ (allows us to add gain to manage the fixed Threshold), and ‘Output’ (from -6 to +4 dB) are the parameters that we can alter.

The SL473 can be used in mastering. This compressor was employed for the final stage of vinyl cutting, which, from what I understand, was the procedure where what we now know as Mastering began to be developed. It can also work on MixBus, DrumBusses, Voices, and Glue compression by providing transparent compression.