Going from A to Z is never a straight line, and sometimes, you have to make twists and turns for reasons you never thought of, but you end up somewhere even better because of those unexpected turns. Working on the Dynamic en Suite units was one of those times.

In my quest to develop a dynamic EQ, I started out explororing a small, integrated circuit that was brought to my attention by Jakob Erland of Gyraf Audio, originally designed for consumer type/car stereo, providing voltage controlled equalization and gain.

Two different version of the first circuit, on their way to the "electronics scrap" bin at the local waste recycling centre

When we ran initial tests on mock-ups of the circuit, everyone who had a listen was enthusiastic about the character and sound of it, but it also had the fatal flaw of sporting a horrible, inherent noise-level.

In the early stages, I thought of it as something I would overcome to a reasonable degree at some point so I kept working on all aspects of the design, and kept moving forward.

Designing for noise specs is way down on my list of priorities in this post tape-machines era, but the noise was above a tolerable threshold. The most desperate attempt came in the form of incorporating a Dolby noise suppresion circuit, but nothing worked without being too much of a compromise.

After a considerable period of time, I had to do something to keep from going insane, so I decided to swallow the sunk cost, and on the same day, I drove the experimental units to the dump to keep myself from going back to it.​