I feel very lucky to be in the type of community where friends will sometimes contact me and say, “Hey, I have this cool thing I’ve been borrowing that you should hear. A buddy made it, but it’s actually really good!” That community is the New York Hudson Valley producer/engineer network, and in this case that friend was the great David Baron [Tape Op #164] turning me on to the prototype of the Eusonia PRE-1 tube mic preamp. Within a couple of weeks I had driven over to fetch it, and it’s been set up in my studio, Spillway Sound, in the months since. Let me tell you, in no uncertain terms: what Eusonia founders Scott Jacoby [#139], Dave Powers, and Albert Langella have made here is simply one of the best microphone preamplifiers I’ve ever had the honor of using. Scott is a very accomplished producer/engineer in his own right – in addition to being a really nice guy – and in discussing the preamp with him over the course of my trial period, it became clear that he and his partners were aiming to create a kind of dream tool for him to employ in his own work in order to more easily achieve the sounds he’s always strived for. The result for any other engineer using the PRE-1 is that feeling of having a tool in your hands that was well-crafted for the job, like a hammer whose handle fits perfectly in your palm with the ideal weight and balance.
After noting the handsome design of the faceplate, with its unique handwritten labeling, you’ll see some features you might expect on any decent preamp. You can plug a mic into the front or back or plug a 1/4-inch instrument cable into the combo jack on the front. You have normal controls (+48V, a -20 dB pad, polarity inversion), but also some “bonus” controls, each of which allows you to shift the tonal quality of the sound subtly or significantly. First in that category is the Mic Imp selector. I have a number of preamps with variable or stepped input impedance controls, but none with the mojo of this one. Those other pres’ impedance knobs tend to stay in one position because the other settings rarely work. On the PRE-1, each setting (five of them between 50 and 500 ohms) changes the tone of the mic quite a lot yet feels useful in its own way, not just overly muffled or too thinned out, as is my experience with other circuits’ impedance changes. Then there’s the high-pass filter, with five positions between 30 and 150 Hz, each of which also feels much more useful than many other preamps’ HPF circuits for getting sub frequencies out of the way while maintaining the fullness of the sound.
There's a send/return pair of TRS jacks on the back for inserting a processor into the preamp circuit before the output stage. This is very handy for gain staging when using, say, a compressor without an output level control, but I also had a blast putting pedals into this loop without ever feeling the need for any type of re-amp box. There’s a switch for engaging the loop, but even if the switch is off, you can use the Send jack as a mult for parallel processing, opening the doors to creativity during the tracking phase. The beautiful vintage-style VU meter is switchable between input and output stages, and its sensitivity can also be shifted by -10 dB for useful metering at lower gain levels.
All of that is cool, but let me dive for a moment into what makes the PRE-1 next-level special, and that’s the gain staging itself. Other than the Impedance knob, there are four other controls that allow shaping of the harmonic and tonal characteristics of the preamp: Input, Drive, Boost, and Output Level. Each of these stages proved to be extremely important for dialing in the sound I was looking for with a given mic on a given source. I started with the Output at around 75 percent and then brought up the Input knob to get a decent level to the recorder. I then started playing with the Impedance, finding the setting that best flattered the source. I dialed up the Drive knob while adjusting the Output control accordingly, adding subtle harmonic distortion and a small amount of tube compression. Last step was to engage the +10 dB Boost switch while tweaking the Drive and Output levels to keep the output from blowing up my converters, just to see if I liked what that was doing tonally. I realize this may sound like a lot of work, but it actually flows beautifully because the preamp just sounds good in any of its states. At its cleanest, the PRE-1 still has the magic of what a high-end “Super Class A” (as described by Dave Powers) tube preamp can bring; at its dirtiest, it imparts a highly euphonic, useful, and beautiful saturation that both excites and thickens your signal without any of the harshness or nasty artifacts that a lesser circuit design would introduce.
I could give you a list of everything I ran through the PRE-1 with excellent results, but it would just be a list of all the things one records, so I’ll just give you a few standouts: tenor sax through a vintage Neumann U 87, female vocals through the same U 87, male vocals through a Shure SM57, acoustic guitar through a vintage Schoeps M 221 B, upright bass through a JZ Black Hole [Tape Op #71], and Moog Rogue bass synth plugged directly into the DI input. All of these came alive through the PRE-1, sitting big, natural, and present in the mix. Sadly, someone already had dibs on the prototype I’ve been borrowing, but I’ve committed to buying a production model as soon as they hit the street (due to be available by the time you’re reading this). At the given price point, completely within reason for a piece of studio gear at this quality level, I’ll start with one but will be saving up for a second for stereo duties ASAP.