We report the observation of more than 7 dB of vacuum squeezing from a belo
w-threshold optical parametric oscillator (OPO). We discuss design criteria
and experimental considerations for its optimization and demonstrate that
the vacuum squeezing can be electro-optically transferred to a bright beam
using a feed-forward loop. This is compared with the bright intensity squee
zed beam generated by running the OPO as a de-amplifier.