EMT 261

Name: EMT 261
Brand: EMT

The EMT 261 is a compressor/limiter of German broadcast origin, used in professional studios. The paper trail is thin. That's odd for a unit that shows up in the equipment lists of several respectable facilities - John Castle, Bushwick Studio, and Nevo Studios each owned at least two.

What spec sheet survives comes from period trade press. Studio Sound (March 1981, p.44) listed the 261 as offering limiting, compression, and expansion. Input range is -20 dBV to +20 dBV, and maximum gain is 40 dB. Attack is adjustable from 20 ms to 100 ms, release from 20 ms to 5 s, and the compression ratio varies between 1:1 and 20:1. Power is 24 V DC, either polarity, so the unit needs an external supply. That was common in rack-mount broadcast gear of the era.

A later technical review by Hugh Ford in Studio Sound (November 1983, p.70) noted the unit ran from 24 V DC stabilised to ±1 V, with grounding arbitrary. The same piece measured common-mode rejection as good. It found the floating transformer-coupled output impedance to be 34 Ω at 1 kHz. Third-order intermodulation distortion ran about 0.3% at 20 kHz, which is respectable for a dynamics processor of its generation. The limiter section was described as fast-acting, catching overloads cleanly.

The 261 appears in service-page company alongside the EMT 250/251 digital reverb, the EMT 266, and the EMT 444, all part of EMT's professional studio lineup. No explicit product-family hierarchy is documented. No original price, production years, or user manuals have surfaced in the usual archives. Collectors of German broadcast outboard are interested in the unit, but none of the sources consulted record current market values.