I've always tried to make Little Labs products original creations. Making another compressor made no sense to me; there are so many compressors, and most are knock-offs of the classics. They all used FET, Opto-Cell, VCA, or Vari-Mu design. Little Labs wanted something genuinely new and original.

Introducing the LL2A. First, it has nothing to do with the infamous Universal Audio LA2A; we just chose the name (for better or worse) to get your attention. The LL2A is a unique compressor limiter utilizing a four-quadrant multiplier as the gain reduction element; no commercially available compressor uses this technique. What does that mean to you? With only two active components in the audio path, this circuit creates an invisible compression with fewer artifacts (distortion and color) than any other compressor on the market. The LL2A has a fast 400-microsecond attack and knee designed after the very popular Fairchild 670 number two setting but with a 0.9-second release. It is fantastic on vocals; it lets a vocal float in a mix without coloration.

More on the development of the LL2A...

When I met Dave Amels in the mid-2000s, I knew him as the Bomb factory guy who did all the math to make some of the first popular audio plugins. I know he put considerable effort into the math to emulate some of these vintage devices; the math involved is incredibly complex. But later, which was absolutely brilliant and misunderstood, Dave took the same math and, using linear analog multipliers, put this math to work again, not for plugins but for making analog computers and actual hardware using this modern component to recreate these vintage devices with all their odd non-linear anomalies, using this state-of-the-art component. It's like the movie The FLY, where Jeff Goldblum's machine creates a synthetic version of the object rather than the object itself.

But what piqued my interest was not recreating a vintage device but creating a state-of-the-art gain reduction element using this AD633ARZ four‑quadrant analog multiplier that reacted smoother than other gain reduction devices. Dave Amels, the mathematical genius, made it happen, and I am truly grateful. This new technique allowed Little Labs to birth a new original compressor.

Using a single AD633ARZ in the audio path and the same output driver I use on the Little Labs Monotor, I believe Little Labs had made the shortest audio circuit path compressor ever. We all love compression, but sometimes you need compression without color and artifacts; when that is the case, the Little Labs LL2A is your baby!