Focusrite Green 4 (1997)
Two channels of British compression, launched as Focusrite's bid for the semi-pro market and priced right into the teeth of the competition.
Overview
The Green 4 arrived in mid-1997 as Focusrite's first serious push at the semi-professional buyer. Even a "cheap" Focusrite still cost real money. Studio Sound (July 1997, p.40) put it plainly: the Green range was inexpensive by Focusrite's own standards, but the units still sat near the top of the price ladder compared with most other manufacturers' ranges. The Green 4 was built for the project studio owner who wanted a genuine Focusrite dynamics box but couldn't justify a Red-series unit. The trade-off was that the Green 4 faced far stiffer competition than any of its siblings, and reviewers knew it.
Focusrite refused to bolt on distractions. This is a compressor-limiter, full stop. No gate, no expander, no de-esser, none of the Swiss-army-knife clutter that cluttered so much mid-'90s outboard. Studio Sound (July 1997, p.40) counted that single-mindedness among the unit's real strengths. You get two channels, stereo-linkable, each with its own threshold, ratio, attack, release, and makeup gain, plus a separate limiter section and a pair of sidechain filters. The ratio runs from 1.5:1 up to 10:1, attack runs from 0.3ms to 100ms, and release spans 0.1s to 4s. Those are proper studio numbers, not the token ranges you find on budget boxes.
The knee switch gets the most ink. The Green 4 offers both hard-knee and soft-knee compression, selectable with a switch rather than baked in at the factory. Studio Sound (July 1997, p.40) reckoned this the compressor's biggest boon, arguing that hybrid designs vary wildly between manufacturers and that being able to audition both characters in one box expands what the unit can do. Soft knee for invisible glue, hard knee when you want compression to announce itself as an effect.
The release pot has a bypass, engaging a programme-dependent automatic setting for those times when you'd rather the box did the thinking. The one omission a period reviewer flagged was the lack of an automatic attack mode. Studio Sound (July 1997, p.40) called it "not essential, admittedly," but nice to have on occasion. The sidechain filters sweep from 15Hz to 10kHz on the high-pass and 65Hz to 25kHz on the low-pass, and can be switched in as a pair. They're steep enough to tame a boomy kick or soften a sibilant vocal, which lets you squeeze hard without the whole mix pumping.
The limiter is a separate section, with its own fully variable threshold and release (20ms to 1s), plus a switchable look-ahead function. Look-ahead delays the audio relative to the sidechain, so the limiter has a few extra milliseconds to catch transients before they clip. Studio Sound (July 1997, p.40) was candid about how to use it: the limiter works best as output protection, catching the occasional hot blip, rather than as an effect you pile into at the end of the chain.
Metering follows the pattern of the Green line: an LED ladder that defaults to input level but switches to gain reduction, displayed as a moving single dot. Each channel can be bypassed independently, and the pair links for stereo work, with Channel 1 taking control while filtering and look-ahead switching stay independent per channel. Connections are balanced XLRs, and there's a link jack for slaving multiple Green units together for multichannel jobs.
The Green 4 does its best work on difficult material. Studio Sound (July 1997, p.40) described the compression as pleasantly granular at high processing levels, contemporary-sounding and sophisticated, with surprisingly fine resolution. It singled out the unit's skill at controlling really tricky stuff. The verdict was that it's cure-all dynamics you can throw anything at, stacking up well against the opposition. That's a strong endorsement for a box that was, by Focusrite's standards, the cheap one.
The Green 4 is a compressor, not a channel strip. If you want the mic preamp and EQ, that's the Green 5, which pairs a mic/line preamp with shelving and two parametric mids, plus a gate/expander the Green 4 leaves out. Buyers in 1997 had to choose which half of the signal chain they needed. The Green 4 also doesn't flatter a bad source, since its transparency, praised by reviewers, cuts both ways. And the semi-pro positioning means it doesn't carry the cachet of the Red-series boxes.
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