Abbey Road Studios: The TG12321 ‘Compander’ In 1962, EMI inventors Edward Trendell and William Percival patented a tape noise reduction system which was named the TG12321 ‘Compander’. Compansion is effectively a method of compressing on input, and expanding on output. The first units were built in February 1964 and were originally designed to reduce the hiss that was apparent on tape recordings. This technique wasn’t so useful for pop recordings, as the hiss would disappear in the background. However, the engineers did find they could creatively use the Compander, and in typical Abbey Road fashion, they took a piece of gear and used it in a way it wasn’t originally intended to be used. The first generation of Abbey Road pop engineers, and particularly, Peter Bown and Geoff Emerick, found you could use these units to overload the preamps on a REDD desk, creating a unique high-frequency saturation. The sound of the legendary TG12321 was recently modeled in the Abbey Road Saturator plugin, in collaboration with Waves Audio. The Abbey Road Saturator provides inspiring saturation and distortion unlike any other device, offering two versatile desk distortion flavors: the crunchy tube REDD sound, and the rounded solid-state TG12345 tone. LEARN MORE ABOUT ABBEY ROAD SATURATOR. LINK IN BIO. #AbbeyRoad #Gear #TG12321 #Saturator #Compander #TG12345