Recent past work has demonstrated that hydraulic semiactive vibration absorbers hold the promise of providing an ideal means of mitigating structural vibration. This paper examines a factor that must be treated when designing a hydraulic semiactive vibration absorber for application to a full scale structure; fluid compressibility. An expanded and consistent dynamic model of the flow process is first established. A simple feedback control is then tested on a single degree of freedom laboratory structure to verify the findings.