Trakker

About the Trakker

The Crane Song Trakker is a high-quality single-channel discrete Class A analog compressor-limiter designed for professional recording, broadcast, and sound reinforcement applications. It features all-discrete Class A transistor circuitry with no ICs in the primary signal path, ensuring pristine audio quality. The unit offers selectable compression modes including transparent operation and vintage compressor-limiter emulations with hard or soft knee settings. It uses Pulse Width Modulation (PWM) to control a pair of parallel FETs for gain reduction, providing a neutral and clean signal path. The Trakker includes adjustable threshold, attack, release, knee shape, and makeup gain controls, plus a 16-position rotary Character switch that selects among four compressor types (Hard Knee, Soft Knee, Optical, Air-Optical) and four amplifier/gain control styles (Clean, Vintage, Clean VCA, Vintage VCA), yielding 16 sonic variations. It has transformerless balanced XLR inputs and outputs, a 22-element VU meter with overload indicator for gain reduction monitoring, and can link up to 8 units for surround mixing with tracking accuracy within 0.1 dB. The unit is housed in a single rack space steel and aluminum chassis, operates on 100-240V AC, and consumes 45 watts. The Trakker is praised for its versatility, sonic character options, and excellent metering, making it suitable for a wide range of compression tasks from transparent bus compression to colorful vintage-style effects.