Description
Rare, original-model Valley People Dyna-Mite in the yellow plastic case. Refurbished in our workshops
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
In this original two-channel Dynamite the channels are stacked one on top of each other in a plastic case. This example is in very good condition with all original knobs & switches. The case and front panels are in equally good condition but there are broken corners on a couple of the back panels. These don’t affect operation. The plastic panels are quite fragile and this one has survived the last forty years pretty well!
This Dynamite has been refurbished as follows:
- new, 220 Volt power transformer
- upgraded power supply
- recapped with high-quality Panasonic capacitors
- caps in the audio path replaced with Panasonic bipolar caps
The original Dyna-Mite was also available in a black & silver 1U rack case with black knobs – I have one in prep now
Subsequent Dynamite models had a very different style with one-piece front panels
“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”
