Drawmer DS501 Power Gate
A gate that made engineers rethink gating, and then made them count their pennies.
Overview
Most engineers treat a noise gate like a leaky roof. It's necessary, it's boring, and nobody notices it until it fails. The Drawmer DS501 Power Gate was built to change that, and by most accounts it did. It's a dual-channel gate in a single rack space. It took the frequency-conscious sidechain filtering that made the DS201 an industry standard and pushed it further. It also added a transient-shaping circuit called Peak Punch, which no other gate offered at the time. Sound on Sound (June 2001, p.96) framed the DS501 as an addition to the DS201's legacy rather than a replacement, noting that Drawmer wisely left the earlier design alone while extending the concept.
The unit has two fully independent channels, side by side across the front panel, with a Stereo Link switch between them for stereo work. Each channel gets the five envelope controls any serious gate needs - Threshold, Attack, Hold, Decay, and Range. Finding all five on one box was rare enough that reviewers made a point of it. The Range control stays active per channel even in Stereo-Link mode. That lets a linked pair close to different depths, so a stereo drum pair doesn't collapse into an identical, unnatural shutoff. A vertical four-LED ladder next to the Threshold knob shows signal relative to the threshold. Three status LEDs across the top report gate state: red closed, yellow hold, green open.
The Key Source section, to the left of each channel's controls, is what separates the DS501 from a garden-variety gate. A two-position Ext/Int switch selects internal keying (with the onboard filters) or an external key input. Two continuously variable knobs set low- and high-frequency shelving filters that cut sharply below and above the chosen corners. That gives you frequency-conscious gating without patching in an outboard EQ. Trim the highs so snare and cymbal bleed stop triggering a kick gate, or boost the lows so a tom's resonance holds the gate open for a natural decay. Switch to Ext and the same section handles ducking and more experimental work, like a kick drum keying a bass guitar to tighten its attack, or a metronome or vocal triggering gated effects. An Output switch with bypass, gate, and key-listen positions lets the engineer hear exactly what's doing the triggering, which saves an afternoon of guessing.
Peak Punch gave the DS501 its name and its reputation. It sits to the right of the gate controls, with a three-position switch (bypass, full-band, and frequency-tunable) plus Tune and Level knobs. In either active mode the circuit delivers a 10 ms gain boost every time the gate opens, reinforcing the initial transient of the gated signal. Full-band mode allows as much as 12 dB of boost via the Level knob. Frequency-tunable mode applies that gain to a specific band set by the Tune control. For a weak or ill-defined drum hit, it's a genuine problem-solver. Reviewers cautioned that it rewards moderation. Pushed too hard on a kick track it can produce an unpleasant pock, and low-end boosting in tunable mode tends to add boxiness rather than punch. Set above 1 kHz, it sharpens the beater click so the attack cuts through a dense mix.
Electronic Musician (January 2002, p.134) came away impressed enough to name the DS501 its favorite dynamics processor of the year, praising its quiet operation, minimal coloration, ample headroom, superfast attack times, and noiseless bypass switching. The same review singled out the smooth, forgiving attack control as the thing that lets a kick drum soften musically instead of clicking audibly — the failure mode that makes lesser gates useless on drums. The reviewer's only real complaint was ergonomic: eighteen rotary controls and ten switches crammed onto a 1U faceplate means small knobs and tight, tiny legends that are hard on fingers and eyes when millisecond adjustments matter. It's a fair criticism and a familiar tradeoff — everything on that panel earns its place, but the panel is crowded.
The rear panel is all professional. Each channel has +4 dBu balanced XLR inputs and outputs, plus ¼-inch key-input jacks, and there's a standard IEC power-cord jack. There is no provision for -10 dBV signals, and unbalanced operation requires custom cable soldering, a real limitation for anyone hoping to drop one into a home setup. Voltage selection and fusing live inside the all-steel chassis, so you can't reach them without opening the unit. The build quality drew no complaints. The DS501 is described as a well-built professional tool, and the comprehensive manual with clear diagrams reportedly decodes the more esoteric features in about five minutes.
Pricing is where the story gets complicated. Early coverage listed the DS501 at $550, but Electronic Musician issued a correction (2002) stating the actual price was $900. That's a significant jump, and it knocked the value rating down accordingly. EQ (June 2002, p.116) and Studio Sound (April 2001, p.42) both covered the unit as a serious studio tool rather than a budget curiosity. At $900 it was never an impulse buy. The reviewer joked about needing to afford eight of them for a 16-track analog studio, and the joke lands because the DS501 is the kind of processor you want on every channel once you've used one.
In practice the DS501 shines on the sources that defeat ordinary gates. Kick drums dial in tight in a couple of passes, with the key filter tuning out snare bleed. Rack toms hit lightly are normally a nightmare of bleed and unreliable triggering. They come under control with a lowered high-frequency shelf, a slight attack lengthening, and a light Peak Punch boost around 500 Hz. The unit handles vocals, saxophone, oboe, and even atmospheric rubber-mallet guitar with more grace than expected. Long decay settings of a second or more make its processing practically undetectable on ambient room mics. The one source that reportedly didn't benefit was a softly bowed cello. Ducking opens up broadcast and post-production uses, such as automatically attenuating a music bed under a narrator, or suppressing rhythmic accents to leave only cymbal decays and rests.
Today the DS501 is a professional-grade Drawmer gate with a feature set that few competitors matched: onboard key filtering plus tunable transient shaping. It comes in a rugged steel chassis that survives rack life. The caveats are the ones the reviews flagged: a cramped faceplate, balanced-only I/O that demands the right cabling, and a price that was steep when new.
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