Black Lion Audio Seventeen 500 – 500-Series FET Limiting Amplifier

Its not your grandpas 76.

Seventeen 500 is Black Lions 500-series spin on what the classic 76 compressor could have been. Featuring a redesigned and improved IC-based front end, Seventeen 500 renders incredible detail and nuance normally not possible with a 76-style compwhile adding some features unavailable on original 76s.

What makes Seventeen 500 different?

First, Seventeen 500 features a new IC-based front-end circuit not found in classic 76 compressors. It provides a clean, punchy, modern sound under light compression and a more colorful vintage character when pushed. That front-end, when coupled with our custom-designed Black Lion output transformer, is why Seventeen delivers a huge bottom end that balances out its open top end very nicely. All told, Seventeen 500 is capable of delivering a broader tonal palette than original 76s.

Seventeen 500 features BLAs proprietary Black Lion-style power decoupling for an incredibly low noise floor. It also uses high-grade Nichicon signal capacitors, widely considered some of the highest quality caps available, reducing the noise floor even further.

Black Lion could have stopped there but why? Other features and upgrades include: a frequency-adjustable sidechain; separate selectable high- and low-pass filters; and a wet/dry mix knob parallel compression straight out of the box. Beyond offering a palette of tones not available to anything else on the market, Seventeen 500 also includes the all-important stereo link function.

Last but not leastyes, it does all-buttons-in mode, and weve made it much easier to engage multiple ratio controls simultaneously than on classic models.