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The BlackAsh SC-5 Black Friday deal takes 51% off, so it costs $19 until Nov 22, 2026, on Black Rooster Audio's 80s-style VCA compressor plugin.
The maker says it is modeled on the 'black' version of a classic, sought-after VCA compressor. The brief they give it: gentle sweetening on the master bus, a colored or smashed drum bus, or taming lively, dynamic material.
It is a compressor plugin in the VST, VST3, AU and AAX formats. It has a BlueAsh SC-5 sibling, and the maker says the BlackAsh version differs in three ways.
Press the "Ext SC" button to engage the external sidechain input. The SC-5 is a feedback compressor design, and patching an outside signal straight into that loop would turn it into a feed-forward circuit with different compression behaviour.
So the maker handles it another way. The external signal is treated like the normal audio signal, and the resulting control voltage drives a mirror VCA that modulates the audio. Feedback operation stays intact in both modes.
The SC-5 has a fixed threshold, so you get more compression by pushing the input gain up. That also makes the signal louder.
Hold the right mouse button as you turn the input gain knob, and the output level shifts automatically to offset the change. The perceived output level stays roughly the same, which makes it easier to judge the compression itself.
Black Rooster Audio uses a real-time, SPICE-type, component-based circuit simulation. According to the developer, the SC-5 recreates the hardware's gain cell, its two-stage detector with separate timing behavior, the looped feedback topology, and the signal path itself.
The DSP code is pipelined with the SSE2 instruction set. Oversampling adjusts automatically to your session's sample rate to save CPU, and aliasing is attenuated by a low-latency, linear-phase Dolph-Chebyshev poly-phase design. The interface supports high pixel density displays on Mac and Windows.
If you run Windows, the maker's manual tells you whether your DAW supports high-DPI displays.
Yes. The BlackAsh SC-5 Black Friday deal takes 51% off, bringing the compressor plugin to $19 until Nov 22, 2026.
Yes. Engage it with the "Ext SC" button. The external signal is processed like normal audio, and a mirror VCA applies the resulting control voltage, so the compressor keeps its feedback operation in both modes.
The formats are VST, VST3, AU and AAX in 64-bit hosts. Mac needs OSX 10.9 or newer, with Intel Core or Apple Silicon M1/M2. Windows needs version 7 or newer and an SSE2-compatible processor. Both need 1GB of RAM.
The SC-5 has a fixed threshold, so more input gain means more compression and a louder signal. Drag the input gain knob with the right mouse button held, and the output gain adjusts to keep the perceived level roughly the same.
Prices and end dates are checked at publishing time and can change, so confirm them at the store before you buy.