Ryan Freeland

Interviews

Ryan Freeland

By Larry Crane and Elizabeth Streight

Ray LaMontagne's 2010 album, God Willin' & the Creek Don't Rise, may have won a Grammy award for Best Contemporary Folk Album, but I'd refute that narrow categorization. It's an album of honest songs, real performances, and some real feelings. Ray self-produced the...

Read More →
John O'Mahony

Interviews

John O'Mahony: Coldplay, Metric, Sara Bareilles

By Curtis Wayne Millard, Larry Crane

Electric Lady Studios has a long, amazing New York recording history. Under the guidance of Lee Foster, the studio has seen a renaissance over the last decade. Daft Punk, Arcade Fire, The National, Black Keys, and Lana Del Rey are just some of the recent clients. John O' Mahony, a charming...

Read More →
Colin Marston

Interviews

Colin Marston: Gorguts, Dysrhythmia, Liturgy

By Justin Foley

New York City's independent metal scene has recently burst into mainstream view. At least two venues are primarily putting on heavy music shows nearly every night of the week. Several of the best metal blogs are based out of the city, and there's an exciting diversity and...

Read More →
Just Blaze

Interviews

Just Blaze: Jay-Z, Eminem, Kanye, Drake

By Andrew Piccone, Zac Meyer
Justin Smith, better known as Just Blaze, catapulted to the upper echelon of hip hop in...
Read More →
Gerald Seligman

Interviews

Gerald Seligman

By Guido Rottman, Larry Crane
Archiving the recorded audio history of the United States? The National Recording...
Read More →
EveAnna Manley

Interviews

EveAnna Manley: Behind The Gear with Manley Labs

By Larry Crane
Under the leadership and vision of EveAnna Manley, Manley Labs has created and built some...
Read More →

MORE FROM THIS ISSUE

FEBRUARY 21, 2026 INTERVIEWS
EveAnna Manley (bonus)

EveAnna Manley (bonus): This Issue's Ruler of Tubes

BY LARRY CRANE

Under the leadership and vision of EveAnna Manley, Manley LabsURLhttp://manley.com has created and built some of the finest studio equipment (and high end home audio components) over the last two decades. Studios across the world count on their mostly tube-based EQs, compressors, microphones, preamps, mixers, and more.

FEBRUARY 21, 2026 INTERVIEWS
Just Blaze (bonus)

Just Blaze (bonus): Jay-Z, Eminen, Kanye, Drake

BY ANDREW PICCONE, ZAC MEYER

Justin Smith, better known as Just Blaze, catapulted to the upper echelon of hip hop in the early '00s as the producer behind a string of hits with Jay-Z and Roc-a-fella Records. He has been in high demand ever since, working with Eminem, Lil Wayne, Drake, Kendrick Lamar, Mac Miller... really, it's hard to find a major rapper who hasn't worked with him. I recently went up to his Rebel Base studio within Stadiumred in Harlem to discuss hip hop beats, videogame soundtracks, live DJing, and his New Jersey-bred connection to dance music.

FEBRUARY 21, 2026 INTERVIEWS
Lou Clark

Lou Clark: Studio Designer

BY JOSH NACHBAR

Lou Clark is an accomplished recording studio designer, engineer, and avid supporter of the Audio Engineering Society. With over 20 years of studio design expertise on a national level, his list of successful designs is impressive.

FEBRUARY 21, 2026 INTERVIEWS
Robert Honoblue

Robert Honoblue: Dave Brubeck, George Benson, Weather Report

BY LARRY CRANE

With over 40 years of studio experience, and having worked with artists like Dave Brubeck, George Benson, and Weather Report, Robert Honablue was recently the Director of Engineering at The Honablue Institute of Audio Engineering in Brooklyn's Bed-Stuy neighborhood. I dropped in one afternoon to talk about his career. Unfortunately, soon after our chat Robert closed down THI. "It is with great sadness that I have to announce the closing of THI Studios to our clients and all potential clients. I know that THI served as one of the finest studios around for your projects. But running THI as a school, studio and mastering suite has taken its toll on me, and my doctor has suggested that I let go of the business for health reasons." — Robert Honablue

COLUMNS

END RANT by Larry Crane
Putting the Pieces Together
END RANT

Putting the Pieces Together

by Larry Crane

Last issue we ran John La Grou's article, "The Future of Audio Engineering." In John's look ahead we see a harrowing glimpse of a world where the audio engineer, composer, and musicians are possibly reduced to one person who works in a virtual creative world. This caused me to think about the...

GEAR GEEKING by Andy Hong
Gear Geeking - Issue 101
GEAR GEEKING

Gear Geeking - Issue 101

by Andy Hong

For those of you interested in how Tape Op gear reviews are produced, I'd like to relate what happened with a particular review published in the previous issue, and springboard to a summary of the whole gear-review process, and to some extent, how reviews relate to advertising. Longtime contributor...

GEAR REVIEWS

Gear Reviews

Apollo Twin audio interface w/ UAD-2 DUO DSP

BY Apollo Twin audio interface w/ UAD-2 DUO DSP  |  reviewed by Dana Gumbiner

I've been slowly building up to a realization that my older FireWire interface and I have to break up. We've been a good couple. At first, she was clearly too good for me, what with her classy 96 kHz-capable converters, and high-end, ahem, clocking. But after time, our relationship began to show...

Gear Reviews

Channel Compressor (500-series)

BY Channel Compressor (500-series)  |  reviewed by Chris Garges

AwTAC (Awesome Transistor Amplifier Company) of New York is quickly proving itself as a manufacturer with high standards. Since the introduction of its Channel Amplifier [Tape Op #93] three years ago and their Panner module (which adds a stereo- panning summing bus to the L/C/R bus in the Channel...

Gear Reviews

Comp 500 VCA compressor (500-series)

BY Comp 500 VCA compressor (500-series)  |  reviewed by Geoff Stanfield

I just got a new knife. It's Japanese, ceramic. I can use it for damn near everything I need to prep and cook a meal. I have other knives - boning, chef, serrated. So why do I use my new one for just about everything? Because it works - every time. The Daking Comp 500 is like that knife. A very...

Gear Reviews

DarkHorse X12 speaker cabinet

BY DarkHorse X12 speaker cabinet  |  reviewed by Scott Evans

Maybe it's love for the underdog, but I dig Traynor amps. When I play music instead of recording it, my main amp is a big-ass '70s Traynor Mark 3 - a Twin-style circuit with EL34s. It's an oddball amp, and I love it. So I jumped on the chance to review this little DarkHorse 15H. Of course, today's...

Gear Reviews

EZdrummer 2 drum production plug-in

BY EZdrummer 2 drum production plug-in  |  reviewed by Larry Crane

Back in the '80s, when we needed a beat and didn't have a drummer present, we used to have analog and digital drum machines to keep time. They were rarely confused with real drums, but some had a quality that earned them time in the studio due to charm (e.g., Trio's Casio VL-1), intense sonic...

Gear Reviews

London 12 Room Kit

BY London 12 Room Kit  |  reviewed by Scott McChane

Many of us live in the "real world" - a place where we don't always have the resources to select, structurally modify, or build a "perfect" production room within the spaces we rent or own. Nine times out of ten, we just have to go with what we've got. For some of us, that means a bedroom, an...

Gear Reviews

Media Center

BY Media Center  |  reviewed by Garrett Haines

I often need to audition audio files or compare different sources. I used to have a generic session in my DAW for this, but that became unmanageable. There were simply too many sample-rates, formats, and variables to rely on a single generic file. Fortunately, I found a great application that...

Gear Reviews

Pro-MB plug-in

BY Pro-MB plug-in  |  reviewed by Dave Hidek

It seems like every time that I use a new plug-in from FabFilter, I find myself ceasing to use another similar plug-in that'd I'd been religiously using for years. Such was the case again with FabFilter ProMB; a multiband compressor/expander that, like most FabFilter plug-ins, re-invents familiar...

Gear Reviews

Pro Tools 11

BY Pro Tools 11  |  reviewed by Eli Crews, Andy Hong, Scott McChane

For many months, contributing writer Eli Crews and Assistant Gear Reviews Editor Scott McChane have been switching back and forth between Pro Tools 11 and Pro Tools 10 [Tape Op #89] for their recording and mixing duties. Neither has finalized their move to PT 11, but both are looking forward to the...

Gear Reviews

Radial PowerTube 500-series mic preamp

BY Radial PowerTube 500-series mic preamp  |  reviewed by Will Severin

I have always been a fan of Radial's direct boxes and have gotten plenty of use out of their JD4 rackmount DI over the years, so I was excited to record some tracks with their latest 500-series unit. Radial's line of 500-series modules can now lay claim to a tube-based mic preamp - the PowerTube....

Gear Reviews

RC 500 channel strip

BY RC 500 channel strip  |  reviewed by Joseph Lemmer

The RC 500 is a 1RU-height, rackmount, solid-state channel strip, with a mic/line/instrument preamp that routes to a FET VCA-based compressor followed by a three-band semi-parametric EQ. The EQ and compressor utilize the same circuitry as in the PreSonus ADL 700 [Tape Op #93]. It's an all-metal...

Gear Reviews

S2 stereo amplifier

BY S2 stereo amplifier

Getting prepped for this review was something of a unique experience. For the first time in five or six years of doing reviews for Tape Op, the founder of a company wanted to speak live over the phone to me. Sounds mundane enough - but that one event speaks volumes for the way my entire experience...

Gear Reviews

Saracon sample-rate conversion software

BY Saracon sample-rate conversion software  |  reviewed by Garrett Haines

Perhaps sample-rate conversion is something you do rarely. On the other hand, if you're like me, you have to juggle multiple projects that need preparation for different destinations and sample-rates. Saracon is one of the premier SRC applications on the market. It works with PCM digital files, but...

Gear Reviews

SCM25A three-way active monitor

BY SCM25A three-way active monitor  |  reviewed by Thom Monahan

At its core, recording, like any creative endeavor, is about us making decisions one-by-one, until they all pile up on each other to form something meaningful from the raw material - in our case, the performances and sounds in front of us. If we're lucky, it's just "flow," and we're not even aware...

Gear Reviews

Send N? Blend 500-series wet/dry bus

BY Send N? Blend 500-series wet/dry bus  |  reviewed by David Hidek

Serpent Audio's Chimera is the first LA-3A clone to fit in a 500-series module, complete with that opto-circuit compression that so famously soothes vocal dynamics or unruly bass lines, or... well, works well in pretty much any other scenario you can think of. Fitting the LA-3A-style guts into a...

Gear Reviews

SOM50 SuperOmni condenser mic

BY SOM50 SuperOmni condenser mic  |  reviewed by Adam Kagan

In a world of modern mics which are all beginning to look and sound alike, the SOM50 mic stands out from the pack both visually and sonically. Ashman Acoustics, a Seattle based company, is headed by Matt Ashman, a veteran of AEA mics. Matt approached the design of the SOM50 in a way that is unique...

Gear Reviews

The Box analog project console

BY The Box analog project console  |  reviewed by Scott McChane

Hybrid mixing is here to stay. (Required reading: "What is Stem Mixing?" [Tape Op #87]) This may explain why our friends at API Audio, with their rich history in analog gear, have "thrown-in" to the ever growing project-studio market by offering a small-format console to meet modern audio-...

Gear Reviews

TrackSpacer plug-in

BY TrackSpacer plug-in  |  reviewed by Eli Crews

This is a simple little plug-in that does one thing extremely well - it gets other stuff out of the way. It does that by employing a unique and elegant method, creating a reverse EQ profile of whatever signal you feed into its sidechain input. It works like this: when you assign TrackSpacer a...