who done it best?!
mid-fi tape fuzz? bigfoot?? …saturation #tone-quest 4 synths
On a more standard compressor the attack release isn’t being triggered and instead is dynamic and you can think of it more as a slight smoothing lag on volume movement.
I always thought the attack/release portion of a compressor was in fact an ASR envelope triggering above a certain threshold. One difference however between Heat and a standard compressor might be that the ratio control in a compressor is dynamic (depending on the amount o dB above the threshold), and the Heat envelope only has a fixed depth.
If that is the case, the envelope follower in the Heat could act as a dynamic attenuator above the threshold. You could even mix attenuation from both the ASR and the envelope follower, to achieve the degree of dynamic attenuation you want.
UAD articel on compressor function. ASR and threshold function is illustrated nicely.
Not sure about this: the control signal in the output of AH envelope follower is depending on the amount of signal in the input.
I actually don’t see why AH is just said to do “pseudo-compression”, to me it can really act as a compressor and even bringing some increasing saturation driven by the envelope…
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The fact is: everything is a Compressor and everything is a Delay! 
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Sorry for being unclear. I was referring to the ASR “fixed” envelope function (but it was not so obvious from my wording). When we are talking about the envelope follower, I agree - it is dynamic.
I also wrote that you could mix the envelope follower and the ASR, which turns out not to be true. You can choose between a triggered “fixed” ASR or the envelope follower.
From the manual, page 25:
Tightly coupled with the Envelope Follower is also an Envelope Generator. If you do not want to use the follower output directly, you can choose to use the follower only to trigger the Envelope Generator, if you want to use predefined Attack/Decay (or Attack/ Release) times rather than follow the audio with the rise/fall slopes.
Either way, Heat can act as a compressor the way I understand it.
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In another thread a user sez:
A compressor uses an attack and a release but the compression taking place between those points is dynamic right? Where on the Heat it’s a straight-up envelope.
i.e. if you look at a sidechain signal on a comrpessor it might look a bit like this:
No, in following mode AH envelope follows the signal that is above the trig (= threshold above which the envelope is trigged, I’m not fond of such vocabulary confusion).
So if you assign the envelope to a negative volume, you would pretty much compress the signal the way a compressor do, as far as I can understand.
I don’t understand why in the manual pseudo-compression example the AD envelope is chosen, but I reckon it’s closer to how a compressor behaves in reality.
In conclusion, it is my understanding so far that the AH can compress, rather well in fact, and even add some flavor while at it.
But I’m open to being explained why I’m wrong 
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Good extra info!
I think regardless of whether it’s doing ‘real compression’ or not it’s still not ideally suited for it, it’s fiddly, you don’t quite have the right controls and it’s not geared towards it in the way something like a Boum is. I have a suspicion if you wanted to use it this way you spend a lot of time nursing it?
I mean we’re 48 posts deep in a thread and still confused about it haha
I’m starting to think Elektron are trolling us.
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The post you quoted is in fact referring to the AH envelope follower function, not the ASR fixed
envelope. I guess the point here is that the smoothing of the AH envelope follower is not suited for compression. There is no variable smoothing on the AH follower, so this might be a point when trying to achieve a “typical” compression effect, though to be honest it does sound like a slightly nitpicking point…
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It took me a long time to understand the principles of compression, while they are rather simple (threshold above which higher volumes get lowered to get the sound fuller, to be able to raise the overall volume + envelope on compression triggering + knee so that the compression triggering point is less obvious).
The AH is a multi-purpose FX, so it’s not labelled as a compressor, and of course you get a bit of menu-diving à la Elektron + the unfit vocabulary.
But if you understand compression, you’ll have no trouble to dial the right controls even if “ratio” is “envelope depth”, “threshold” is called “trig” and such.
Anyway, if you can achieve compression with it, I reckon AH can be considered as a compressor ^^
And as you can save presets, you don’t always have to go menu-diving I guess.
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Yea - I guess that’s fair though - i.e. if you actually want to buy and use a compressor thigns like that will matter - in the same way as not having access to ratio or make up gain stuff - I’m starting to think this is why Elektron refer to it as pseudo compression, not because it’s not actually being a real compressor - but that it’s doing it a bit around the houses and not quite how people would expect.
Makes sense to describe it as a bonus rather than a core feature, becomes a nice extra rather than something that doesn’t work properly.
Sure, but it doesn’t have a pseudo-filter, pseudo-EQ or pseudo-character section 
Can’t blame us for being a bit befuddled if that’s how Elektron describe it.
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Maybe this whole discussion is a bit beside the point though. The main points imo should be:
1- is it possible to set up the AH to perform compression duties? Answer: yes
2- is it easy to set up? I would argue it’s not much more difficult than adusting a standard compressor. It always invloves a bit of tweaking anyway, right? Just route the AH follower to volume and off you go adjusting the input gain, threshold etc.
3 - does it sound good when performing compression duties? I guess we should go ahead and find out
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All else considered this is a resounding yes
I chose Boum for my end of chain though personally - although I do wish it had the 2 channel EQ from the Heat, can’t have it all!
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I could wrong but I am pretty sure they are kind of leaving out a bit of detail on how the attack and release work here as they are still in play as long as you are above the threshold. Like once above the threshold if you move downwards and then upwards the attack and release are still coming into play effecting the speed at which you reach or move away from the ratio. If your compressor has metering you can pretty easily watch this in effect.
So I guess in my mind the trigger threshold thing going on in the heat works when you break the threshold and with the ASR it will sustain as long as you are above the threshold and then release when you drop below. If you have a sound that moves above the threshold, then moves up again, then moves down but not below the threshold, then up, then finally drops below. You are only getting a 3 stage envelope for all that where in effect it would be like a 5. Thats why drums are a good use case for the heats style of compression because you can set it up to consistently break the threshold with a predictable up then down motion.
I suppose I don’t fully know the feature set of the heat but can you set the envelope follower to only be effecting a parameter when above the threshold?
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oh
nice
Oh that makes a bit more sense with the envelope follower attack release acting that way, it is sort of the equivalent of having your threshold turned to -∞ I think? Controlling the depth of the envelop follower being similar to controlling the ratio.
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I got that as well.
Another cool thing about the Heat, is that I don’t know of many hardware compressors that will show you the audio waveform so you can see what the compressor is doing to the audio.
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Good point indeed.
I mostly picked a mk2 for this.
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