Collapse

Most compressors work the same way. Measure the signal, compare it to a threshold, apply gain reduction. The math is tidy, the results are predictable, and a well-set compressor in Classic mode is exactly that — smooth, the kind of transparent gain riding that disappears into a session and does its job.

Fracture is a different story. It runs a proprietary dynamics engine under the hood that reacts to transients in a way a conventional compressor simply doesn't. Push it and it doesn't just turn things down — it does something to the signal that's easier to hear than explain. Drums come apart differently. Peaks don't get rounded off, they get taken apart. It's aggressive in a way that ratio and attack time alone can't account for, and it's the kind of character that makes you stop reaching for other plugins. It has a sweet spot, too, and a dedicated Knee meter shows you exactly when you've hit it.

Classic takes an external sidechain, so another track can drive it. Fracture is multiband: it splits the signal into three bands and compresses each on its own, so the middle can come apart while the low end and top end keep their shape. Both share the rest of the chain: a detector high-pass, post-compression saturation at 4× oversampling, mid/side width control, and independent input and output trim with metering at each stage. A/B slots let you compare two parameter states in real time. A full undo history means nothing is ever permanent. Classic or Fracture — two ways to collapse.