Gear Reviews

For quite sometime many have viewed Waves L2 as the best digital plug-in limiter. And over the years, there have been many challengers. While some upstarts had strengths in different uses, none seemed to have that all-around solid performance of L2. Heck, I know quite a few people that think Waves...

Anyone who's read my reviews in Tape Op has probably seen one of my "dealing with headphones in a busy studio sucks" rants where I complain about how my clients treat all my headphones like crap and throw them on the floor until they don't work anymore. Well, Bill Hannapel at...

Audio-Technica has just released a microphone that I've been waiting on for years. The ATM450 is a small-diaphragm condenser microphone. Audio-Technica makes several excellent small-diaphragm condenser mics already, but what makes this one different is its side-address design. The ATM450 is...

The Lemur is a unique, open-ended controller geared towards DAW and live-performance applications. The Lemur hardware is essentially a flat touch-screen interface (kind of like a tablet PC) which utilizes a proprietary "multitouch" technology, allowing one to use all ten fingers to...

When this unit arrived in my studio, my first assumption was that it was a "remix" of the DigiMAX 96 or LT, both of which are fine units and sound pretty good, especially for their price. But honestly, they're kinda boring. Eight preamps feeding eight A-D converters to...

Last winter, I got my hands on a Savage Macht 12x guitar amplifier and haven't tracked guitars without it since. For technical details and configuration options, visit the website. I'm going to focus on what it's like to record with this little 12 Watt, 6V6-driven, 1x12, tube combo....

I love the Arturia plug-ins and so does Dana Gumbiner. Between the two of us, we've reviewed every plug-in synth they've ever released. But as much as I think the plug-ins are amazing, I use them less often than I'd like because of their complexity and huge CPU hit. The graphics are...

The Mbox 2 Mini is the most compact of Digidesign's Pro Tools systems; it's almost exactly the same size as a stack of four CD jewel cases. It has some heft due to its robust metal enclosure; I wouldn't be afraid to lose it for a few days within the depths of my courier bag, where...

I have fallen in love with a software synthesizer. I never thought it could happen to me. After long, fulfilling relationships with my analog synths (various Moogs, Rolands, etc.), I kinda brushed off most analog-modeling software synths as budget imitations, which is really snobbish and unfair, I...

This is the last book I ever bought at Tower Books on the corner of Broadway and Land Park Dr., before they and the entire Tower Records chain, which was started here in Sacramento, CA, went out of business this past Fall. In fact, Tower was started in the drugstore (Tower Drugs) that was located...

Having never used any Buzz Audio products before, I was intrigued at the prospect of checking out this 2-channel Class A preamp. The 1RU-height box features a nice array of front-panel controls for each channel: polarity reverse, 20 dB input pad, finely stepped gain knob (+16 dB to +65 dB), phantom...

Native Instruments-a company whose reputation was built on software as opposed to hardware-just released their Audio Kontrol 1 into a market already crowded with affordable portable recording interfaces with excellent audio quality and reasonable flexibility. But rather than just follow the...

Over the last two years, mixing at The Hangar, John Baccigalupi's studio in Sacramento, I've come to rely on the pair of ADAM P22As that John has in the control room there. They've been just about my favorite monitors that I've ever used. They're accurate without being...

Creating a sample instrument is a seemingly straightforward task-record the sound of the instrument with great fidelity, and program a sleek and usable interface to trigger that recording. However, the breadth of styles and ambiences that a piano can have greatly complicates this task. Reason...

The more I use Pro Tools, the more I use outboard analog. I used to have a single table-high rack of outboard processors (not including all my preamps), but these days, I'm working with two racks full of analog processing. My latest addition is a pair of 5033 EQs from Mr. Neve's Portico...

As I write this, I'm just finishing up rough mixes for a project that I tracked and edited with Pro Tools HD 7.3. It's my favorite upgrade in recent years. 7.3 added so many crucial user-interface tweaks that it's far easier to get around a project, and it's even possible to...

China Cones are an isolation device used to decouple monitor speakers from the console, stand, or surface supporting them. Made of ceramic, the manufacturer claims China Cones vibrate in a frequency range outside of human hearing, making them a better isolation solution than brass or other commonly...

Almost 20 years ago, I was working for a recording studio that was owned by an FM radio station. One day, the Program Manager asked me if I wanted some gear the station was throwing away. They had just redone the transmitter and were tossing two Gregg Labs Tri-Band broadcast limiters that were part...

Wow. 34 inputs and 36 outputs via a single FireWire cable. 32 channels of ADAT Optical I/O at 44.1/48 kHz; 16 channels S/MUX'ed at 88.2/96 kHz. Two channels of S/PDIF I/O. Word clock in and out. Two balanced analog outs on TRS connectors with a level knob. Headphone out. MIDI I/O. And...

There's hype, and then there's hype... and then there's HYPE. No buzzwords have been spared in the promotion of M-Audio's new tube microphone, the Sputnik. "The end of microphone envy," with its saucy overtones, is supposed to say it all. It's compared to...

Abbey Road Studios along with their stateside partner, Wade Goeke of Chandler Limited, are continuing to make some of the great sounding early audio gear from the EMI empire available to us common folk. Wade's hardware is amazing, but the plug-ins are also surprisingly great. The EMI...

Our pal Diane Gershuny turned us onto this handy little studio organization tool at the Austin NAMM show and sent us a few to try out. AudioSkin is one of those plastic products that wraps around loose cabling and turns it into one neat bundle of cables that's easier to deal with. The super...