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.