[MarkK]

Depends what you call signficant. If there was no reason for FETs to
generate distortion then equipment based on FETs would have inherently low
distortion. In actual practice, FET are competitive with other active
devices, some better some worse. For example, FET based audio gear has
never become the clearly dominant approach, whether power amps or preamps.
Ditto for audio op amps. More traditional and non-traditional use of
bipolar
devices rule, which is not to say that FETs have totally gone away.



Besides the distortion (which is easily improved per my previous post) FETs
as VCAs also suffer from the fact that it is difficult to make multiple
channels tack one another due to the wide variation of gate characteristic
from part to part.

This is not an issue in mono compressors but is an issue in almost every
other application.