I suspect that this might have to do with the DOA stage. Which might be amplifying the sound a bit before the compressor.
Because that is the actual point of the drive circuit. It clips the signal, rounding off the peaks. If you push it too far it goes into total distortion. If you push it to the edge, you “chop” the peaks of the signal off and therefore are able to higher the overall signal. Which is, very similar to what one can achieve with a limiter. Hence my comment about that. Saturation in itself can be seen as a form of compression.
Because it’s impossible for the compressor to work at 0 seconds at full capacity. This is what the attack handles. So the transients of the sound will go through uncompressed pretty much as the attack stage handles how long it takes before the compressor works at full capacity. The attack cannot be 0ms. This is how compression works. It lowers the signal in volume. So it’s logical that the RMS becomes much lower, since that is how RMS works. It measures the avarage loudness in a certain window of time (300ms, I just looked that up). So you see that the avarage volume drops as the compressor is lowering the volume of the signal. But the peaks are not lowered as much since they don’t get compressed at full force immediately. Hope this makes it clear for you.
The drive happens AFTER the compression circuit. As I mentioned before you are in a way limiting the signal as peaks clip.
As mentioned you are contradict yourself here with point 3. The drive indeed sits after the compressor.
To answer your question: The reason for this is A. This procedure is explained as the right way to get the optimal drive setting through the transformer, and B. This makes sense since you first drive the signal into distortion, then compress the signal as much as needed to get it just short of that distortion. Thus limiting the signal. of course one could do it the other way around as well. Keep drive at 0, compress until you are pleased with the sound, then higher the drive until you hear it distort and dial it back a little. The downside of this is that when you compress the signal gets lower in volume. So to hear it well and to compensate you’d want to add gain. But once you then start to use drive to clip the signal it becomes super loud. So starting with drive, start very loud, then compress, thus lowering the volume. Basically two birds with one stone in a sense. (If that makes sense)
Two differ approaches where I guess the former is to get your level as loud as possible. And the latter to gain the most pleasing compression amount. There’s no right or wrong here really. Both methods can also end at the same result. This is why I go back and forth between settings until I’m pleased with the balance between sound and loudness.
You are comparing loudness levels in two different realms of audio here which doesn’t make much sense. In the digital domain things are measured at full scale (dbfs) and in the analog domain things are measured in dBu. Changes in one domain happens relatively the same as in the other domain. However, 0dBu = -18dBfs. So you can see that the numbers on the front panel work on level measurements in dBu not dbfs. So what you wrote here doesn’t add up.
If you want to hear the IMC clearly compress the signal, listen to the part where I am working on the break of the track. You can hear the pad sounds pump really heavily (even more than they are in the track itself) after I engage the IMC.
Hope this clears it up for you. And please, next time, try approaching a discussion and questions with a bit less of an aggressive and defensive manner. Then you can expect an open conversation and answers to your questions in a normal manner as well.
And from my end, I do apologize for the one comment where I said that your opinion doesn’t mean anything because you haven’t tried the unit. I shouldn’t have said that.
Cheers and have wonderful holidays everyone. I’m signing off of the forum for a little while.
