User Manual

Summit Audio TLA-100A

Tube Leveling Amplifier

Rev. Aug 10, 2014

Softube User Manual
© 2007-2014. Amp Room is a registered trademark of Softube AB, Sweden. Softube is a registered trade-
mark of Softube AB, Sweden. All visual and aural references to the Valley People Dyna-mite, Tonelux and
Tilt are trademarks being made with written permission from PMI Audio. The Tonelux and Tilt logo, the
Valley People, Dyna-mite and associated logos, are trademarks of PMI Audio Group, used under license.
Summit Audio Inc. is a trademark by Baltic Latvian Universal Electronics, LLC, used under license. All
specifications subject to change without notice. All Rights Reserved.
Other company and product names mentioned herein are trademarks of their respective companies. Men-
tion of third-party products is for informational purposes only and constitutes neither an endorsement
nor a recommendation. Softube assumes no responsibility with regard to the performance or use of these
products.
Softube products are protected by patents SE526523 and SE525332, and related patents/patent ap-
plications, including WO06054943, US11/667360, US2004­0258250, EP1492081, EP1815459, and
JP2004­183976.
Your rights to the software are governed by the accompanying software license agreement (End User Li-
cense Agreement).

Disclaimer
Every effort has been made to ensure that the information in this manual is accurate. However, there are a
chance that we have made mistakes, and we hope that you understand that we are only humans. Please let
us know about the mistake, and we’ll fix it in the mix (or in the next version of this manual).

Support
On the Softube website (www.softube.com) you will find answers to common questions (FAQ) and other
topics that might interest you.
Support questions can be posted at http://www.softube.com, where we will help you as fast as we can!
Web: www.softube.com
E-mail: info@softube.com
Phone: +46 13 21 1623 (9 am – 5 pm CET)
 SOFTUBE USER’S GUIDE  | iii

Contents

1 User Interface 5
Menu Row. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5
Key Commands. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6

2 Summit Audio TLA-100A Compressor 7

More Than a TLA-100A. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
User Interface. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8
Mono and Stereo Operation. . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10
Credits. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10
   | 5

1 User Interface

Softube plug-ins are “what you see is what you

get” products. You should be able to intuitively learn Enable Enable/Activate the plug-in.
the products within minutes, so that you can work Set to off for bypass.
fast and efficient with them. There are a couple of
things that remain the same for all of our plug-ins,
Setup Changes global options for all
such as the menu row. These will be explained in
instances of that plug-in.
this chapter. For detailed information of a particular
plug-in, please see its chapter.

Menu Row
In the bottom of the plug-in interface, you will see
a thin black row with some buttons. We’ll use the
Dyna-mite plug-in as example, but the same goes
for all plug-ins.
Enable
About Box Opens the “About” Box with When the Enable switch is set to on (I), the plug-
version info. in is active and will process audio. When set to off
(0), it will be bypassed and not process any audio. It
Value Display Displays the knob value when will take considerably less CPU when it is bypassed.
the mouse is hovering over a
control.

“About” Box Value Display Enable Setup

6 |  USER INTERFACE

Setup Key Commands

In the Setup window you can change settings that All numbers and labels in the plug-in are clickable.
will affect all instances of that particular plug-in. If This allows you to easy select a setting by clicking
you for example de-select the “Show Value Display” on the wanted value. Hovering above a label will
option in the Bass Amp Room plug-in the value turn the mouse pointer into a pointing hand.
display will be off for all Bass Amp Rooms on your
system until you select that option again.
Mouse
The different options vary between Windows and
Mac, and also different formats and plug-ins. The
most common options are: Up/Down or
Mouse Wheel Change a parameter, such as a
Show Value Display: Enables the parameter and knob or a switch.
value display in the bottom row of the plug-in.
Reverse Mouse Wheel Direction: (Mac OS
Only) Changes if the a knob is turned up or down
Keyboard
when the mouse wheel is turned up or down. (Mac
OS Only) Fine Adjust ⌘ (Mac) or Ctrl (Win),
while changing the parameter
You need to restart your host software (DAW) before the value.
changes to fully take effect!
Reset to Default Alt, while clicking on the
If you messed something up and manually need to knob or fader.
set these options, you’ll find them in text format in
the following locations:
Mac OS: ~/Library/Application Support/
Plug-In Specific Key Commands
Softube In many plug-ins, you can shift-click on a knob or
a switch to get some extra functionality
Windows: username\Application Data\
Metal Amp Room
Shift-click and drag a mic will move both mics
simultaneously.

All Amp Rooms

Shift-click in the cabinet background will change
cabinet (or amp) without any animations
   | 7

2 Summit Audio TLA-100A

Compressor

More Than a TLA-100A

THis SUMMIT COMPRESSOR IS A CLASSIC, but
we felt that there are a couple of features that could
really bring this unit into the 21st century. So we
decided to add an extra panel below the unit. If
you don’t care about fancy features, just disregard
that panel and the TLA-100A will work just as the
original unit.

Low Cut
It is always handy to have the ability to filter out the
lowest frequencies so that the compressor doesn’t
react on them. Here you also have the possibility to
choose whether you want to put the low cut on the
entire signal (just as if you would have had a Low
Cut inserted before the TLA-100 plug-in) or put
on just the detector part of the compressor (a.k.a.
“sidechain filtering”) amount of saturation from the tube output stage in
the compressor. Without it, you would have to use
Parallel Inject = Parallel Compression the Gain control to set the desired amount of dis-
Parallel compression, ie. mixing a compressed signal tortion and compensate for that loss or increase in
together with the original signal, is a standard prac- volume with a separate volume control. The Satura-
tice today. So instead of using several mix buses to tion does all that. In one knob.
achieve this we added a knob.

Saturation = Headroom = Mix Level Adjust

It’s always difficult to choose what level the virtual
0 VU should correspond to in the digital world.
Some people use drum loops that peak at 0 dBFS,
while others use material recorded at -24 dBFS.
That’s why we added the Saturation control. With
that control you can tune the headroom and the
8 |  SUMMIT AUDIO TLA-100A COMPRESSOR

User Interface
The user interface consists of two panels, the upper panel, containting the original TLA-100A knobs and
switches, and the lower panel that offers extra functionality.

Attack Gain (Output volume) Reduction/Output Gain Reduction

Release Meter
Meter Select

Upper Panel
Attack A three position switch with fast, medium and slow settings, which corresponds
to the time it takes the compressor to respond to the input signal.

Release Controls the time it takes the compressor to return to unity again. A three position
switch with fast, medium and slow settings. The release time is also effected by the
program material. The slower the release time setting, the more the program material
determines the release time.

Meter Select Allows monitoring the output level (output) or the amount of gain reduction taking
place (reduction).

Gain Output volume. Unity gain is at “25”. The value display in the lower menu bar will
show 0.0 dB.

Gain Reduction Sets the amount of gain reduction and the operating point where gain reduction
begins. The higher the gain reduction, the higher the ratio becomes. Works almost like
a threshold control.
 SOFTUBE USER’S GUIDE  | 9

Lower Panel
Low Cut Adds a low cut filter on either the detector or the input. From off to 600 Hz. Off
disables the low cut functionality.

Low Cut Selector Select if the low cut filter should affect the input: like a normal low cut filter placed
before the TLA-100A, or just the detector so that low frequencies doesn’t trigger the
compressor.

Saturation Sets the amount of headroom in the unit. If you need more distortion, turn up this
knob. Distortion can sometimes be very useful together with slower attack times when
you get loud transients. Use the Saturation knob to limit the transients.

Saturation LED Indicates distortion at the output. You will get the best result if the saturation is used
sparingly on percussive sounds, like a drum bus. Let it take care of occasional peaks,
and do not run it too hot.

Parallel Inject Adds the un-affected dry signal to the compressed (wet) signal. If you are using the
compressor to shape the sound instead of compressing the volume (a rather normal
use case these days), it is often useful to blend some of the original signal with the
compressed track. An overcompressed drum track has few transients, which will make
it sound dull and without energy, but if you blend some of the original transients into
that track you’ll get the energy back while maintaining the overcompressed sound.

Low Cut Low Cut Saturation Parallel Inject

(Frequency) Selector Saturation LED
10 |  SUMMIT AUDIO TLA-100A COMPRESSOR

Parallel Inject

Output
GAIN RED.
Input

Low Cut Saturation Gain

DETECTOR

Attack, Release, Gain Reduction

Block Diagram Credits

The drawing above illustrates the functionality of Oscar Öberg – modeling, Niklas Odelholm – extra
the plug-in. Green lines illustrate the main signal features and testing, Torsten Gatu – framework
path and red labels the parameters. programming, and Arvid Rosén – framework pro-
gramming, Ulf Ekelöf – 3D rendering.
The Low Cut parameters switch between either the
detector low cut filter or the input filter.
Only one of the low cut filters is active at a time or
both bypassed (by setting the Low Cut frequency
parameter to off ).

Mono and Stereo Operation

The Summit Audio TLA-100A plug-in can operate
in both stereo and mono modes. In stereo mode
the plug-in will work as the real unit in “stereo link”
mode. This means that both channels will get the
same amount of gain reduction (which will pre-
serve your stereo image). How the different modes
(stereo, mono and mono-to-stereo) are selected
depends on your host software.
Softube AB, S:t Larsgatan 10c, 582 24 Linköping, Sweden. www.softube.com