Future of VCA-based Products

Here’s all of the updates on our products which use the recently-discontinued THAT chips!

Last Updated: 2026.09.18

2025.09.11

Since Colt Capperrune released a video this week on the future of VCA compressors, we’ve had quite a few people reach out asking about the future of our products. Here’s the deal:

We’ve been relying on THAT Corp to provide critical chips since we started back in 2016. Last week they announced they’re discontinuing some VCA and IC chips that we rely on heavily. There are 6 products that will be affected:

G-Series Buss Comp

E-Series Buss Comp

EuroBuss

 260VU Classic

260VU Deluxe Edition

XL-305R Reverb

How affected? We’ve double-checked our inventory and should have enough stock to take orders on these units for about 1-2 months. Supposedly, THAT Corp is taking orders until the end of the month, before no longer offering them. We have been calling and emailing THAT Corp a few times a day. They are understandably super busy, so we are currently unsure exactly what the future looks like for these products… We are also scrambling to see where any suitable redesigns are possible. The situation is developing — we’ll keep you all in the loop, but this is what we know right now.2025.09.18

2025.09.18

In our note last week we mentioned how THAT Corp was discontinuing chips used in our VCA compressors. We had a lot of comments and positive support, for that we can’t thank you all enough. We have made contact with THAT, but they have still yet to give us a full update on our proposed order. We were hoping to have more positive news this week…

Meanwhile we have been looking at alternatives, but even if successful and we’re happy, this will certainly cause a disruption in these products. We equate changing these parts in these products to performing open heart surgery, while speeding down the tracks on a bullet train.

For reference, at this point, we only have enough stock on THAT chips we use in our E-Buss to serve 20-ish more new orders. Our product stock number on the product pages for each VCA unit now reflects that reality...

A few questions we had this past week we felt were noteworthy (we’ll answer more next week):

Q: If you make your own gold cans in the E-Series Buss comp, why does this chip shortage affect that particular product?

A: The E-buss doesn’t use THAT VCAs, it actually uses the 12 series THAT chips to achieve the width circuit in — in fact, it uses 4 of them. These are the chips we reference above in having a shortage on and creating disruption.

Q: Why can’t you make your own THAT chips?

A: Some other companies have been kind and offered to help, much love and respect to everyone who has stepped up! But let’s also give credit to what THAT has done for the audio community for many years. Each of these chips contain decades of knowledge and experience that may be lost to time, possibly… Frankly, it’s very sad and it’s hard to feel positive about it. The THAT 2180 chips we use in the original G-Series Buss comp actually say “Blackmer 2180” when we order them, (and we use two different grades of pretrimmed for different distortion levels in each original G buss). That’s right, these were designed by by the folks at DBX carrying the exact technology of the man himself, who designed the first VCA circuit used in the 160VU. Simply put, this is a lineage of specialized knowledge. Each chip requires a very careful and extensive (and expensive) microscopic-level fab process to achieve their noise and distortion figures, a scale where incredibly small changes in distances make a measurable difference — (part of the same reason we don’t simply just recreate other no longer made NOS parts from scratch too)

Check out more info on the THAT site here on the 2180 series:

https://thatcorp.com/that-2180-series-pre-trimmed-blackmer-voltage-controlled-amplifier-ics/