A friend of mine is getting into live recording with an old ADAT. He's had decent sucess so far going direct out of the board, but he's looking for compression/limiting to make things more...um...durable. :roll:

He's trying to find a cheap but passable 8-channel comp, and has been unimpressed with my suggestions of the PreSonus ACP88 or a 4 used dbx 166s, mainly because he's a poor student type (hence the high hours blackface ADAT). He did send me a http://www.altoproa…"]link to an 8ch comp[/]="http://www.altoproa…"]link to an 8ch comp[/] by a company called ALTO. I've never heard of them. They seem to be something of an Italian Behringer at first glance.

The service manual is available for download there, complete with schematics and layouts. A cursory look says it's a pretty solid design. Not fabulous, but nothing scary either. It looks like more than a $50/ch comp after a couple of minutes with the schematic. I'll try and dig deeper when I'm not feeling so sleep deprived (22 hour session...4 hours of sleep...ugh)

So, should I tell him to buy it for it's under-$400 street price, or should I tell him to wait it out and buy an ACP88 for twice as much?

Thanks

-dave