Drawmer DS-404
Four channels of British gating in a single rack space - the expander that spent the late '90s at a thousand dollars and now changes hands for a fifth of that.
Overview
The DS404 Quad Noise Gate is a four-channel gate built by Drawmer, the British firm long associated with professional studio and live audio equipment. It was designed and manufactured in the UK. It takes up a single rack unit - Canford's listing calls it plainly "4 channel, 1U rackmount" - and it was sold as the DS404 Quad Noise Gate. The page title here reads "Drawmer DS-404." Either spelling will find it.
What's documented about the internals is thinner than the reputation suggests. The headline technology was Drawmer's "Programme Adaptive" circuitry, which the company says optimises attack time and ratio and has some effect on the manual release setting. The trade press picked up on the same thing at launch: Recording Engineer (January 1992, p.64) announced the DS404 as shipping with "program adaptive" circuitry capable of handling an extremely wide range of program input signals. The same announcement noted the hard/soft gating switch at the center of the design. In hard position the gate gives ultra-fast response. In soft mode the unit takes on expander functions with gentler release characteristics.
That hard/soft split is the whole personality of the box. In soft mode, Drawmer's own documentation describes the DS404 as becoming "a versatile Expander capable of handling vocals and sub mixes" - the material where a fast, chatter-prone gate is the wrong tool and a slow, musical expander is the right one. The variable high- and lowpass filters give what the company calls "frequency conscious gating." The user defines a band the gate listens to, instead of letting it trigger on whatever rumble or hiss crosses threshold first. An eBay listing title for one unit mentions XLR-balanced connections, which is the only connector detail that has surfaced in the research.
Beyond that, the specification record is close to empty. The operator's manual reportedly covers power requirements, fuse rating and type, case size, and unit weight, but the actual values have not been captured in the accessible sources. There are no dimensions, no weight figure, no frequency response, no THD, no impedance and no signal-to-noise number. Anyone quoting those specs for a DS404 is working from something other than the paper trail. What can be said is the channel count, four, and the rack format, 1U.
Key Features
Programme Adaptive Circuitry
The DS404's central claim was adaptability. Instead of making the user dial in a fixed attack and ratio for every source, the Programme Adaptive circuit optimises attack time and ratio on the fly and influences the manual release setting as well. Per Drawmer, the gate behaves sensibly on a snare close-mic or a piano submix, two signals that want completely different envelope behaviour. This is the feature that made the DS404 more than a four-in-one DS201, and it's the one to understand before buying a used unit.
Hard and Soft Gating Modes
A front-panel switch selects between two quite different devices. In hard mode the DS404 is a fast, conventional gate - the trade announcement described ultra-fast response - and this is the setting for drums and other percussive material where you want the gate to snap shut and stay shut. In soft mode the unit becomes a programme-adaptive expander with a gentler release, aimed at vocals and sub mixes. Status LEDs distinguish the modes.
Frequency-Conscious Gating
Variable highpass and lowpass filters let the user restrict what the gate responds to. A kick drum's low end can trigger the gate while nearby cymbal bleed is ignored, or a vocal can be gated without every nearby rumble setting it off. Drawmer markets this as "frequency conscious gating."
Four Independent Channels in 1U
Four complete gate channels in a single rack space is the practical argument for the DS404 over a pair of two-channel units. Each channel is independently controllable, and the design allows the channels to be used together or separately depending on the session. For a live engineer running a drum kit or a studio tracking multiple sources at once, that's one rack unit and four gates.
Historical Context
The DS404 was positioned explicitly as a companion to the DS201 Dual Noise Gate, which Drawmer and its dealers describe as the "industry standard" gate worldwide. The DS404's stated design goal was to complement that unit at the highest specification, giving users who already trusted the DS201 the same quality in a four-channel format. It is not a budget alternative to the DS201. It's the quad sibling.
Dating the introduction is harder than it should be. A period announcement in Recording Engineer (January 1992, p.64) reported the unit as shipping, which would put it in the early '90s. An apparently identical listing also survives dated October 1984 in the same publication, and that date looks like an OCR anomaly rather than a genuine earlier launch. The true introduction year is uncertain, and the DS404's production run is not documented in the sources available here.
Collectibility & Value
The DS404 has followed the classic pro-audio depreciation curve. A Mix (May 1998, p.4) advertisement listed the DS404 Quad Noise Gate at $999, sitting above the MX30 Gated/Comp/Limiter at $449 and the MX40 Punch Gate at $599 in the same lineup. One reseller's listing cites an original price of $1,249.00, and a February 2026 deal write-up quoted a Reverb price of $199.99 — an 84% fall from that original figure. Current UK retail through HHB is listed at £675.00 excluding VAT, which reflects dealer stock rather than the used market. The used market is where most of these change hands, and the spread between the $999 list price and the ~$200 Reverb deal price tells the story.
Equipboard places the DS404 in the "High-end/Boutique" tier, noting it as built to very high standards with premium features — fair enough for a British-made professional gate, though it's worth remembering that boutique status in 2026 doesn't translate to boutique prices for a '90s rack unit. A vintagedigital.com.au page is titled "The Legendary Drawmer DS404 Quad Gates," which is the kind of language the model attracts, but no review text from that page has been captured.
Buying advice from the available record is limited. A tested eBay unit was described as "packaged well" with "All knobs are original." Original knobs matter to collectors, and missing or replaced knobs are worth flagging. Audio Trader sold a good-condition example that had passed a seven-point functional test. No common failure modes, maintenance requirements, capacitor issues, or spare-parts availability have been documented in any source, so a buyer is on their own for service history. Given the age of the design, a functional test before purchase is the sensible minimum. The absence of published failure data is an absence of data, not a clean reliability record.
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