"All-button" or British mode[edit]
The ratio buttons are designed to be mutually exclusive, so that pressing one ratio button deselects the others. However, British engineers discovered it was possible to push all four buttons in at once, an unexpected use case that led to unintended behaviour, with a substantial increase of harmonic distortion. This became known as "All-button" mode or British mode,[4] and is popular enough to be explicitly supported by modern clones of the 1176.
The way the 1176 sounds, and specifically, the way all-button mode sounds, is partially due to its being a program dependent compressor. The attack and release are program dependent, as is the ratio.
The 1176 will faithfully compress or limit at the selected ratio for transients, but the ratio will always increase a bit after the transient. To what degree is once again material dependent. This is true for any of the 1176's ratio settings, and is part of the 1176's sound.
But in all-button mode, a few more things are happening; the ratio goes to somewhere between 12:1 and 20:1, and the bias points change all over the circuit. As a result, the attack and release times change. This change in attack and release times and the compression curve that results is the main contributor to the all-button sound. This is what gives way to the trademark overdriven tone. The shape of the compression curve changes dramatically in all-button. Where 4:1 is a gentle slope, all-button is more like severe plateau! Furthermore, in all-button mode there is a lag time on the attack of initial transients. This strange phenomenon might be described as a "reverse look-ahead".
