Allen & Heath Mini Limiter

The Allen & Heath Mini Limiter (a.k.a. the Pro Limiter) is a compact vintage 1970s compressor/compressor and preamp unit. It offered a variety of attack & delay settings, variable threshold settings & stereo linking.

Although a relatively semi-professional and cheap sonic enhancer, it worked very well with Phil Collins' vocals, giving a sharp attack resulting in a very guttural, extraordinary kind of vocal sound which became a trademark of Phil's (and Genesis') sound.

All three Genesis bandmembers (Phil, Tony and Mike) received a pair of A&H Mini Limiters as part of an AHB Studio Package System they each bought during the early months of 1979. While the Mini Limiter was restricted to use for demos (in Mike & Tony's cases), Phil Collins was the first to take the limiters with him to the recording studio. This would be during overdubs & mixing of Face Value in 1980 at The Townhouse (London) and The Village Recorder (Los Angeles); it was coupled with a Beyerdynamic M88 for recording vocals, rather than using the higher-grade preamp units available in the studio. The Beyer & A&H Limiter combination proved to be the right formula for his vocal sound, which Phil would use over the next decade or so (both solo and with Genesis), heard on many songs like "In The Air Tonight", "I Don't Care Anymore", "Mama" etc.

However, the Mini Limiter was being used less and less by the time of We Can't Dance (1991) as the A&H was being viewed as "a bit of a prop" at this point. Tony Banks even remarked that Phil "sound[ed] like he has one of those limiters built into his throat(!)" having sung to it for years.

"One More Night" was the only time that Hugh Padgham used the A&H limiters for adding compression to the stereo mix. Initially, Hugh was under a tight deadline to finish the mix (to be released as a single in America) and couldn't get the mix to "jump out of the speakers" with the SSL compressors applied (built into the console), so he went for the Allen & Heath limiters instead and finally worked.

Quotes on the Allen & Heath Mini Limiter
"'Also, vocally, we had this Limiter, which was made by a company called Allen & Heath, and they had this thing called a mini-Limiter. When Phil was singing, he would always sing through it. Nine times out of ten when you’re recording someone’s vocal, you would have a Limiter or a compressor on it to keep the dynamics within a certain range, and in those days, when you were using tape, it was even more important. He discovered that if he sang in a very guttural way the Limiter would really grab hold of it. You can hear it on his vocals, not so much on the ballads, but on the more rocky ones. It’s a very distinct sound, really. Also, he loved to have a tape slap echo or a digital delay on his voice. A bit like John Lennon always used to do when he sang. John Lennon didn’t like the sound of his voice, so he always used to cover it up by having a big slap delay.' (Hugh Padgham)"

On mixing "One More Night":

"'I have an interesting story about the making of “One More Night.” We recorded the song, and I knew it was a catchy song and had a chance of being a single. We were mixing it, and I just really wasn’t happy with the sound of it. I remember someone came to pick it up to take it to America to be mastered. We sent it away and it came back the next night, and they had to take it to America on the Concord or something. We used to mix on a SSL state logic desk and that had its own compressor built into the stereo mix bus. It wasn’t pokey enough, so I took out the SSL one and inserted these Allen & Heath Limiters, which you would never normally do because they were only semi-pro audios. So, suddenly I put the compressors over it and the whole thing sounded really, really great. I had to balance the whole song around the fact that it was going through these compressors. It worked, but I had to be careful with not producing too much noise because it was a quiet song. It was the first and last time that I mixed through these compressors. I don’t know what made me think of using them, but I did and that was it.' (Hugh Padgham)"

Paul Gomersall on the A&H limiter:

"'When Phil did his first solo album, Face Value, the approach was very similar to this one. He did a lot of demos on his eight -track at home and then transferred it in the studio. And ever since he's had his first home studio, he's had this cheap little Allen & Heath compressor which was about £50 which has a slider on the front with 'more' or 'less' - and he's used it ever since. That's the compressor that he uses in the studio! If you listen to the records where he sings very loudly, you can hear it kick in - it's quite vicious but I really like it. When we were doing one of the songs for Buster with Lamont Dozier, he said: 'I wish we'd had this back in the '60s - it's great!'"

Further information

 * A&H Mini Limiter advert