’Child of our Time Having seen updates to the Urei 1176 and LA-2A plug-ins, it seemed only a matter of time before Universal Audio turned its attention to its venerable Fairchild compressor. However, for those of us who can’t afford such an extravagant outlay, there’s always been the option of using Universal Audio’s excellent Fairchild 670 plug-in, which has been a mainstay of the UAD platform since 2004. Certainly, the few engineers out there who have been lucky to use an original Fairchild 670 will wax lyrical about its unique sound and how its 20 valves impart a highly musical form of gain control. Whether or not the current value of a Fairchild 670 (somewhere around the £30,000 mark at the time of writing) is testament to its audio quality or its apparent scarcity is hard to determine.