Little Labs LL2A - anything similar (sounding)?

[living sounds]

Wouldn't it be best to eliminate the VCA from the signal path completely? Just mix a phase flipped compression signal for GR from the VCA with a purely op amp based signal path? Followed by an additional op amp make up gain stage? Are there designs out there that use this topology? I think some noise gates work by having the VCA outside the signal path...

 

[altfidelity]

Wouldn't it be best to eliminate the VCA from the signal path completely? Just mix a phase flipped compression signal for GR from the VCA with a purely op amp based signal path? Followed by an additional op amp make up gain stage? Are there designs out there that use this topology? I think some noise gates work by having the VCA outside the signal path...

I tried this in digital domain and it works, there is no reason not to. Every copy of the signal is by default bit to bit identical in digital, so the signals null perfectly.

But as soon as there are spectral/phase/time differences in inverted signal (compared to original), there are non-linearity happening.
In extreme cases you get sort of wah/auto envelope filtering going on.

So there is space for non-linearity here, just don't know if this non-linearity is desirable/pleasant or not.

A small leaking of envelope signal into audio path seems to sound "desirable".