Optical compressor rebuilt from a specific 2014 UA LA-2A reissue I own. One unit, measured on the bench, rebuilt so it travels. The equations and the fitted numbers are in the engineering notes.
First 100 at $39 · $69 regular · 14-day refund
Faceplate live · drag the knobs · toggle variants from TWEAKS · audio plays inside your DAW
The unit and the plugin. Same source. Side by side. RMS-matched so you compare character, not loudness.
Three sources (vocal, bass, drums). Eleven Peak Reduction points each. Drag the knob, A/B Hardware ↔ Plugin instantly. Try blind mode if you want to be honest with yourself.
Want the measurement receipt — attack/release numbers, R², provenance, capture conditions? Read it on the Engineering page.
The audio path is the captured 2014 UA reissue — every variant runs the same tube cascade, the same transformers, the same saturation engine. What changes per face is the photocell. Real LA-2As differ from each other for exactly this reason: the T4B cells age and respond on their own time curves. Five photocells is five units in your unit.
Each face also carries small HF and LF tilts — modeling natural variance in transformer + cell response across real units. Silver is the reference (stock output transformer and replaced tubes, no tilt). Other faces sit slightly warmer or brighter at the top, with a touch of LF cut on the mix-bus voicings (Purple, Cream).
Each face also loads a starting knob snapshot — Peak Reduction, Gain, Mode, Saturation — tuned for the source you’re reaching for it for. Switch finishes mid-session: TWEAKS panel, one click, photocell + tone tilts + snapshot swap together.
The unit. Neutral starting point.
The 2014 UA reissue, neutral knob positions. Where every measurement traces back to. Start here for vocals, electric piano, anything you want to sound like the records you grew up on.
Vintage starting point.
UA-reissue vibe out of the box. Bass DI that blooms. Pads that breathe. Slight high-frequency lift on the way in.
House aggressive. Tracking starts here.
House voicing. Hits hard from the moment you instance it. Kick drum, snare, drum bus, aggressive vocal — the starting point for anything that needs to sound finished, not subtle.
Creative / colorful. Limit mode.
Limit mode + 70% wet for parallel-style glue. Master bus, tracking room buss, anywhere you want compression to be a flavour, not a control.
Warm and clean. Saturation off.
Light compression with the make-up gain doing the work. Acoustic guitars, backup vocals, anywhere you want vintage feel without the unit leaning on the program.
All five finishes · no DLC · no upgrade tier · switchable in the TWEAKS panel
ME-TUEY is coming soon. The opto leveler is the keystone. The FET limiter, graphic EQ, channel strips, tape, mastering limiter, and bus compressor follow on a capture-day-driven cadence. Open Studio Rack and the chain stacks inside one window.
· Composite re-rendering against the v1 brand · screenshot returns at v1.0 launch
Roadmap · see the rack ahead
Coming soon · One-time purchase · Two-machine activation · Free updates within v1.x · 14-day refund · No subscription
First 100 reservations lock the $39 sale price. Regular price is $69. No charge today.
36 captures. Three Peak Reduction settings (PR 50 / 70 / 100) across four sources — vocal, bass, drums, acoustic guitar. Same source recording pushed through the unit at each setting, plus the plugin run on the dry input. Natural levels, so the gain-reduction story is what you hear.
One specific unit — a 2014 UA Teletronix LA-2A reissue (UA’s faithful rebuild of the 1960s Lawrence Silver-era circuit), tube-rolled to NOS RCA on V1 / V2 / V3, level-matched, captured at 96 kHz against a dry reference. Below is what that audit produced. No marketing vocabulary stands in for data we don’t have.
Two-regime PR curve: fast attack on transients, mid release on body. Plot is illustrative; the full null-test pack (residual, THD, IMD, Farina deconvolution) will ship with the release.
Every coefficient traces to an I/O measurement on the source unit. R² range covers all four PR-curve segments.
One specific physical unit. Not an “average” LA-2A. Not a decompiled reference. The receipt is the methodology; we publish the capture SOP.
First release off the measured re-fit tree. Sidechain pre-gain re-fitted to the captured unit GR surface — at Peak Reduction 100 the cell now sees +35.8 dB instead of +20.5 dB, closing a ~15 dB under-drive against the hardware. Output polarity default corrected to match the unit. New SAT insert built on the dbx stop-level control law, with per-band MATCH holding level to within 0.15 dB across the full drive range.
Najnudel DAFx-23 two-state ODE photocell replaces the v1.0.1 constant-slope + log1p model. Carrier-pair internal dynamics produce program-dependent attack/release by construction. Bass crest direction now matches the unit’s “body breathes UP between hits” signature.
Book-grounded recalibration: removed phantom auto-makeup, post-GR feedback tap, log1p ceiling. kFloorRatio 0.50 → 0.35. Attack-hold latch added. Loop validation 8/8.
Initial ship. Phase 14 OpticalDetector. 8/9 musical conditions within ±2 dB of the unit.
LA-2A® and Teletronix® are registered trademarks of Universal Audio, Inc. ME-TUEY is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Universal Audio, Inc. References to a 2014 UA Teletronix LA-2A reissue describe a specific physical unit owned by Mentesh Engineering against which our measurement audit was performed. Marketing copy uses these marks nominatively only. See #trademarks and /legal/imprint for the full statement.