Description
The Dynamite was designed by Paul Buff, founder of Valley People. It uses the Valley People TA-101 VCA as the active gain element. Like all Allison Research & Valley products, the Dyna-Mite is a super-fast compressor that excels at clean compression and is particularly good at crushing room mics & generating drum ambience. It’s also a useful expander / gate
This is a very early two-channel Dynamite in a 1U rack case with silver aluminium trims top & bottom. This model was launched around the same time as the version in the yellow plastic case and they are identical internally and sound the same
The plastic front panel has been cracked & repaired previously but it’s not obvious. It arrived with two missing knobs and a couple of bad pots so I’ve sourced a set of new, identical knobs and fitted all new potentiometers
Later Dynamite models from Valley People and Valley International had a different style case with a one-piece front panel and grey knobs
This Dynamite has been refurbished as follows:
- all new potentiometers
- replacement knobs, identical to the originals
- new, higher-capacity power transformer
- power supply upgrade with bigger reservoir caps and better decoupling
- local smoothing caps added to both audio boards
- replacement of all electrolytic capacitors with high-quality upgraded Panasonic caps
- replacement of electrolytic caps in the audio path with Panasonic bipolar caps
“Room mics. Crush the living hell out of them to where it’s almost an ambient sound. Unreal”
“As a compressor, the Dyna-Mite is not very versatile or transparent sounding; but for what it does well, nothing else even comes close. This is my favorite unit for gating, for squashed-with-a-sledgehammer limiting, and abusively loud sound” – Ovnilab
“The limiter is powerful and not subtle. At a high threshold setting, it does an excellent job of squashing down any big peaks, without disturbing your tone when the threshold is not crossed; though during the squashing, the high end can get a bit muffled or “darkened”. Aside from that there is no loss of highs or lows. At lower threshold settings it squashes the daylights out of your signal, with obvious “pumping and breathing”, and much darkening of the tone. However this is a very cool effect, and it can add a funky motion to your action, as well as allowing you to really pummel the listener” – Ovnilab
“The only thing I consistently use it for is smaking the CRAP out of snare drums for that 70’s smacked down sound”
“Mine stay mostly on drums. Room mics and snare. Don’t like them on the entire drum bus much, as they can get a bit grainy and kill fidelity if your OH’s are in the bus mix, albeit punchy as hell. I like them on singular pieces of the kit more. Extremely punchy.”
“I usually use it for parallel stuff, and balance it with the unprocessed track..”
“I also used to use Gain Brains in about the same places”
“Mine stays inserted on a drum “crush” bus, really like it there”
“I use mine for smashing and blowing out drum rooms , it’s amazing and for that alone it’s worth having. Nothing does it like that. Also I use it for indie rock guitars and bass. I used to think of it as a one trick pony but not any more, just depends on how you apply it”
