Becos FX CompIQ Mini

Just how much analogue compressor can you fit in a mini pedal? Becos spent several years answering that question...

I’ve reviewed some larger pedals in Becos’ CompIQ range before — most recently the CompIQ Twain (SOS September 2021) and, a year earlier, the CompIQ Stella. I’ve played guitar for a few decades but have put just as much time into recording and mixing, and find that traditional guitar compressors tend to leave me feeling cold: fine for adding sustain but often rudimentary and noisy compared with tools I use in the studio. So I was over the moon about the control and quality on offer in those Becos devices. At heart, they’re studio‑quality VCA compressors in a pedal format, but they offer lots of bells and whistles — more than any rack gear I own, in fact. It all adds up to give you supreme control over your tone.

Features

Becos have since relocated to Vienna, where they’ve revised and developed their CompIQ concept. Their latest release is the CompIQ Mini and, as the name implies, it’s packed into a tiny enclosure. Becos aren’t the first pedal company to make such efficient use of pedalboard space, but since they specialise in putting more all‑analogue control and features into their pedals than most, this form factor presents significant challenges, and their designer told me it took five years and six version iterations to distil and compact all the features he wanted to fit into this format.

The top panel gives the user a huge amount of control over this compressor, including switching between feedback and feed‑forward topologies.Those efforts have been very successful. First, the pedal is designed around a THAT 4320 Blackmer VCA chip, and high‑quality ‘name’ components are used throughout, including Vishay‑Dale resistors, and WIMA, Panasonic, and Cornell Dubilier capacitors. There are high‑quality, gold‑plated, contact micro‑switches, jack connectors and PCB traces and pads, as well as less obvious reliability features such as protection for high voltages and voltage polarity inversion, and all is beautifully assembled in a sturdy enclosure. This pedal should give you years of service. In fact, I’m told that Becos haven’t yet experienced any product failures, and they offer a three‑year warranty of the product, even where the original owner sells it on.

Perhaps more impressive to me is that, as you should be able to see from the photos, Becos have packed lots of user control into this pedal without making the top panel feel remotely cramped. The white legend is clear and crisp, and its high contrast with the sturdy black enclosure makes it easy to read in low light, despite the small fonts used.

The CompIQ Mini can accept power from 9‑12 V DC centre‑negative PSUs, courtesy of a standard power inlet at the back/top (obviously there’s no internal battery option in a pedal of this size). Audio comes in on the right side through a Neutrik quarter‑inch jack, and out the other side through another. The jacks are offset to allow close placement of similar pedals on your board.

In terms of control, you have three pots: one to set the ratio from 1:1 (no compression) to infinity:1 (akin to limiting); another to set the threshold over a generous range (‑40 to +10 dBu); and an output gain knob. I like the markings behind these too: white with black ‘gaps’, they’re generously deep and high contrast, making it easy to see/recall your settings; a thoughtful touch. Between those first two knobs, a miniature toggle switch selects hard‑ or soft‑knee compression, and beneath the ratio knob is a five‑LED gain reduction meter that ranges from ‑2 to ‑20 dB and uses green, yellow and red LEDs to give a visual clue as to how hard you’re hitting things. Again, a great touch given the size of this pedal.

The two red trim pots may be tiny but they’re knurled, making it pretty easy to turn them with your fingers.

At the bottom, beneath the logo, the single (on/bypass) footswitch is flanked by four more controls. The two red trim pots may be tiny but they’re knurled, making it easy to turn them with your fingers, even if a screwdriver gives you greater precision. Labelled Dry and SCF, these blend between the unprocessed and compressed signals and set the frequency of an unusual side‑chain high‑pass filter, respectively. The former means you can use this pedal for parallel compression: with fast attack times and sufficient gain reduction, that can be a great way to retain note onsets while lifting up lower‑level details.

The latter is more interesting, since as well as letting you filter low frequencies out of the side‑chain (like most side‑chain filters, making the compressor less sensitive to the energetic low end), you can also boost the low end. Technically this side‑chain boost makes the compressor more sensitive to low frequencies. But to put it in more practical terms, you’re effectively lowering the threshold for low frequencies by 6dB, and that can help when processing small signals such as from single‑coil bridge pickups. Neutral (no boost or cut) is at the 12 o’clock position, and turning anti‑clockwise from there gives you a boost, while a clockwise turn introduces a cut.

The toggle switch on the bottom left sets the attack/release timing of the compressor between F (fast) and S (slow), while the last external control, a toggle at the bottom right, switches what’s quite a rare feature in studio processors, never mind pedals: you can choose whether the compressor operates in feedback or feed‑forward mode. Perhaps the best‑known examples of feed‑forward compressors are the rackmount and 500‑series processors made by API and the old dbx 160, but the majority of compressors are feedback types, meaning their control signal is taken after the gain reduction. This means their parameters can be tightly controlled, but also that they can be slower to respond to high‑level transients, which can sometimes overload the gain‑controlling element. Feed‑forward compression will respond quickly to such transients, but can seem a little more fussy about the settings. Most important for this pedal’s purposes is that it results in a grabbier, more aggressive character, and it’s great to have the option on board.

In Use

Due to the format, I’ve discussed the CompIQ Mini as if it were only a guitar/bass pedal. But it’s whisper quiet in terms of noise, can handle line‑level signals, and has a vast threshold range, and with all the other features on board this means it could be used in many other applications too, including as a vocal or synth compressor on stage or in the studio (you’ll still need a preamp for mic signals, of course). So to put this pedal through its paces I tried it on a range of sources over the course of a few weeks.

When it came to electric guitar, I tried the CompIQ Mini with a few guitars on clean and distorted parts, and, while I’m no bassist, I gave it a few outings on bass too. I was every bit as impressed as I had been with the earlier Becos stompboxes, if not more so, given its diminutive form. The noise floor and distortion are impressively low, and I found it quick and easy to dial in fast, high‑ratio compression that caught a few stray over‑heavy plucks, or to set it up to add sustain. The side‑chain filter’s ability to fine‑tune the response to open low strings was welcome. There was enough control for me over the knee and time constants to be useful on both guitar and bass, even with only two options to toggle between for each.

I imagine that, with this many controls to play with, it won’t be to every guitarist’s taste, if only because changing from one setup to another might mean tweaking a lot of controls: you do need to understand what’s going on with this compressor if you’re to get the most out of it. That said, many of the controls can be set‑and‑forget, and I never knocked any of them out of position accidentally. Personally, I much prefer having this degree of control over a compressor!

I played a few vocal parts from my DAW into my console and patched the CompIQ Mini into the channel insert. I probably shouldn’t have been so surprised, given previous experience of Becos pedals, but I really was blown away: this natty little pedal offered almost everything I could want from a clean, transparent vocal compressor. I could set it up as a limiter or a more gentle compressor, and the clear metering made it really easy to fine‑tune the threshold for a sensible amount of gain reduction in either role. The instant parallel compression effect was a real bonus, enabling me to raise all those little details that make lyrics more intelligible, without crushing the life out of the sound. I even found it worked well for gentle dialogue compression. All I might ask for is more control over the time constants, though to be fair the two settings generally do a decent job.

I also fed a number of percussive sources, including various drum close mics, through the pedal. In this role, I loved the snappier feed‑forward setting and the side‑chain filter again came in very handy. While it could certainly handle these transient‑rich signals, there wasn’t the control over the attack and release you need to really shape a drum sound, but it worked great as a limiter and the parallel compression effect was often useful.

Hooking the CompIQ Mini up to a couple of synths, I enjoyed a similarly positive experience as with vocals and guitar. Given the form factor, I could see this device proving popular with the modular synth crowd, or performers wanting a small device to sit on top of a keyboard on stage (though some might prefer a stereo device).

I didn’t encounter any ‘problems’, as such, but being really picky I’d say that the knee toggle switch, tucked away as it is between the ratio and threshold knobs, can be fiddly to operate: pushing it up to the hard‑knee position is easy, but to pull it down required my fingernail.

Verdict

Becos have printed the slogan “Pro Compression” on this pedal, and it isn’t hyperbole. I’ve never before encountered such quality and attention to detail in such a small analogue compressor. Yes, it looks like a guitar pedal and guitarists and bassists who prefer studio‑style compression will love it. But it would be equally at home in a studio, used on any number of sources. Really, the only thing lacking, and only in some scenarios, was more precise control over the attack and release... but Becos cater for that need with their flagship CompIQ Stella.

For me then, the CompIQ Mini really stands out in a crowded mini‑stompbox compressor marketplace, and given its performance and versatility it’s great value too — in fact, if you stuck this in a rack unit and put bigger knobs on the front, you could probably ask three times as much for it! I have absolutely zero hesitation in recommending the Becos CompIQ Mini.