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It took me a long time to appreciate compression. When you’re first trying to understand it, the most difficult part is to actually hear the effect, especially compared to a delay or phaser or fuzz. Since I’ve almost exclusively only played prog or hard rock my entire life, a compressor was never necessary as I could get all the compression I needed from an overdrive pedal. And trying to understand concepts like “sitting in the mix” or “squashed tone” just didn’t jive with me. In order for me to really hear a compressor I needed to crank it. Once you crank most stomp box compressors they become these breathing things that barely resemble your original tone. I have since discovered the magic of using light compression for clean tones to take the edge off the highs and lows and, yes, help it to sit in the mix better. As most stomp box compressors are modeled off of the Ross-style compressor, they tend to squash the sound so noticeably, to me at least, that it creates this distinctive spitting sound at the beginning of each note that is plain offensive to my ears. And forget about using a compressor like that with fuzz or distortion! You get nothing but noise and feedback. What I was looking for was a compressor that lets the unaffected tone of your guitar come through while evening out the dynamics so the volume isn’t all over the place- basically a totally transparent compressor with no coloration at all. Enter the Boss CP-1x. It’s a fully digital multi-band compressor that uses some slick algorithms to keep your dynamics in check without affecting your tone at all. There are lots of grumblings about it being digital as opposed to analog, but so what? Your digital delay that you love so mush is, wait for it, digital too. Most high end reverb pedals these days are 100% digital and on and on. It has an internal voltage transformer that brings the 9v signal up to 18v giving lots of internal headroom. No matter how hard you compress the signal it never breathes and therefore never makes that awful sputtering sound most compressors do. The noise floor from this pedal is much, much lower than most stomp box compressors, but it’s not completely eliminated. It has a handy gain reduction meter so you can see with your eyes how much of your signal is being compressed. And of course it’s sparkly blue and built like a tank.This is as transparent a compressor as you’re going to get at this price point. If you want to even out your sound without affecting your tone, get this. If you want your sound to breathe like country pickers and funkadelic masterblasters, this is not the compressor for you.