Outboard-C — Press Kit

Outboard Audio has released Outboard-C, a studio compressor for Windows and macOS in VST3, AU (macOS) and CLAP formats. It is built around four voicings — Clean, Classic, Optical, Vocal — and four directions — Compress, Inflate, Expand, Shape — behind a shared set of controls.

Classic and Optical switch the detector to a feedback topology for a smoother, self-limiting response; Clean is a neutral feed-forward compressor for mix bus and mastering work; Vocal is tuned for voice. Attack and Release are calibrated to measured 10%–90% gain-reduction transition times rather than a textbook time constant.

Auto-Threshold is a continuous servo that rides the threshold so the average gain reduction settles on a target, independent of input level, with a silence gate. A bipolar Headroom control trims the whole signal path colder or hotter at a compensated output level. The Shape stage adds antiderivative-anti-aliased saturation with up to 32x oversampling.

The sidechain section includes an external sidechain input with a listen mode, stereo linking (L/R or M/S, including a max-linked variant), a four-band tone control that shapes only what the detector hears, and a fully parametric 8-band EQ for the detector signal with per-band type, slope, frequency, gain, Q and solo.

76 factory presets are included across ten categories, with machine-wide synced favorites and A/B compare between two complete plugin states.

System requirements: Windows 10 (build 17134) or Windows 11, x64, or macOS 10.15 or newer (Intel and Apple Silicon).

Outboard-C is available now at outboard.audio/outboard-compressor for €65, with a 14-day trial.