Eventide Omnipressor 2830Au

In 1973, Eventide Clockworks introduced the Omnipressor, the first studio product to encourage the use of dynamics for special effects. It joined the Instant Phaser and, shortly after, the Instant Flanger in studios worldwide. All were used on countless recordings and are now considered truly classic products. Unlike the Phaser and Flanger, the Omnipressor, with its stillunique dynamic reversal, infinite compression, variable gating, and separate "sidechain," was discontinued a few years later. It had become difficult both to obtain some exclusive parts and even more difficult to explain it to an industry that was much less sophisticated than it is today. The original Omnipressor was born from an idea Eventide’s founder, Richard Factor, got while talking to Mark Weiss, one of the scientists investigating the "18-minute gap" of the Nixon Watergate scandal. The sidechain idea that emerged enabled feats of compression that would be impossible (and unstable) with the compression architecture of the day, but doable with the more modern hardware of the 1970s. The earlier "white face (Model 2826)" Omnipressor was not just hard to explain, it was hard to use, and it yielded shortly to the "black face (Model 2830)" unit designed by Jon Paul, another ex-colleague of Mark Weiss. This version, after selling another few hundred units, in its turn yielded to the darkness of commercial necessity – what we now call "supply chain" – and so became a legend to collectors and a desideratum to recordists worldwide.