Mods for ART TCS compressor?

[sweetbeats]

So I have three of them, the ART TCS I mean...don't ask why...okay...because I like how they sound and I'm a drummer so I'm typically working with multiple mics. Anyway, I have really enjoyed what they do to my passive bass and they have been good for vocals too.

They are a Swiss Army Knife unit in my book which isn't always a good thing...you know, the whole "it does a lot of things well but nothing really good" adage...well, in my experience with them they seem to do a number of things pretty good according to my ears FWIW.

So since I've been getting into getting comfortable with the concept of recapping, and now looking into opamp mods for my M-520, that is causing me to look at other gear in the studio (I'm already excited about recapping my Tascam MX-80, my 2 PE-40's and the RS-20B). I started wondering if I could take a TCS and mess with it and make it work even better.

So I emailed ART and asked if the schematic for the TCS was available...Seriously, I must say that they have been really great over the years in supporting their gear...The TCS is now a discontinued product and was kind of a sleeper when it was active, but nonetheless they got back to me in less than 24 hours with a pdf of the ART TCS Schematic.

Anybody want to take a look and offer opinions good/bad/ugly and/or ideas for upgrades? There's a lot going on in that box...

[mshilarious]

Actually the audio path looks fairly simple; it's just a huge sidechain is all. I would leave the sidechain alone. The VCA is a THAT part, I assume it's good. I'm not a huge fan of TL072; I would change that at U1 and U15 for OPA2134. The 5532s I would probably leave, although I don't get feeding the line input into a unity gain 5532 and then feeding that to TL072. But since this is a line input, the noise probably doesn't matter, and if you swap TL072 that will kinda fix that anyway.

Then I would swap the audio path caps for something nicer; C3, C4 for fun, C12, C13, C14, C15, C13, C17, C16. C17 and C16 could be a bit larger if you are feeding something that is not line impedance (10K). And the equivalent parts on the right channel.

I didn't see a power supply schemo . . .

[sweetbeats]

msh, thanks so much for the suggestions!

Yeah...power supply...huh...I'll wait to hear back from ART because I bet that is what's supposed to be on page 1. Worst case I'll just open 'er up and look at it!

When you say swap out the audio path caps for something nicer, are you just assuming that what is in there is general purpose and that caps spec'ed for audio path would be better?

[sweetbeats]

It took a few days, but ART did get back to me with another schematic..."I just received this different schematic from one of our Engineers,
hopefully it contains the info you need."

So nice.

I believe this has the missing info. Pages 2 and 3 look the same as the old version, but this new version has a page 1 titled "Host and Power Supply".

That's promising.

Here is the updated schematic.