Gear Reviews

I've been a fan of the Evil Twin for several years. This is a great, warm tube direct box. You might wonder about the questionable extravagance of an $850 direct box. Well if you think of it as merely a DI you might be right, but you'd also be limiting your purview. You can use the Evil...

Twenty-four bit recording is here, and now it nearly approaches the beauty of analog! I recently had the pleasure of test-driving the newly improved Radar 24 System by iZ Technology. The basic system (24-track, 24- bit hard disc recorder) lists at $4,995, and features a Celeron 667 with 132 Megs of...

Quicker than inserting earplugs (and waiting for them to expand). Bright red and big - they're hard to lose. Put them on like headphones and walk into any tracking session without fear of blowing your ears. Great when you're setting up mics, and the band is warming up. Peltor even makes a...

Russian microphone manufacturer Oktava has been around since the 1950s. The MK 219 (a.k.a. MC 219) has been one of their most known and respected models for quite some time now, and is considered a staple in many studios, especially in England. The MK 219 is a solid state large-diaphragm condenser...

There are quite a few different recording programs available now, and they're all really pretty amazing. It would be hard to say that one is drastically better, or even different, from another. I think it comes down to personal preference and learning the details of each package enough to...

Instead of paying big bucks for prepackaged air check out the ReAir refillable air sprayer. With about ten strokes of a standard bicycle pump, you've got a canister full of compressed air to blow crap out of crevices, patchbays, tape head assemblies, disk drives, etc. When it runs out, just...

How do you review a DI box? Here's what we did. We set up a passive DOD 265 DI ($20), the Raven Labs ADP-1 ($349) and Avalon Designs Ultra 5 Direct ($1450) in a row, all patched into the same mic pres and coming up on the mixer at the same volume (the Avalon's tone controls were off)....

In my living room studio, I mix on a Sony DMX-R100 digital console feeding my 24-bit Alesis Masterlink via a digital link. Therefore, I don't have much of a need for an analog mixdown processor. Occasionally, I have clients that want to mix to analog tape to "warm up" the sound....

We recently installed a MOTU/Macintosh hard-drive recording system into our studio. While some of the plug-ins sound pretty good, the reverbs generally leave something to be desired. Or, if they sound good, like Unversal Audio's RealVerb, they use a lot of the computer's CPU and...

(VST 2.0, MOTU MAS and Digidesign DirectConnect)

I recently had the pleasure of using Native Instrument's Hammond B3 plug-in appropriately dubbed the B4. For those of you like me, who have lusted after the unique character and mystique that has surrounded this most famous of Hammond organs; yet...

Do you ever wonder if some people truly have a vision or whether they just get lucky? I still haven't figured out what attribute to apply to Lynn Fuston, perhaps a little of both. Last year, just around April Fools Day, he assembled the largest assortment of currently manufactured microphone...

I recently had to mix a record at a studio with literally NO outboard gear. What's a girl to do? So I went to the local music store and bought one device: the D2 Digital Delay by T.C. Electronic. I was happy with it's flexibility and therefore was encouraged to try T.C.'s next...

My dad raised me on swing-era big bands and crooners. In the heat of the summer, we'd be down in the cool basement with a stack of 78 RPM records. Many years later, he showed up at my New York apartment with those same records. A well-equipped son, I have all the necessary gear to play...

On first listen the Fostex NF-1A sounds different from most monitors. Many have a smiley-faced EQ curve, with lots of boom and sizzle to make things sound good. If your critical listening needs have not yet been met, check out the Fostex NF-1A. You'll find it provides more midrange detail,...

I used to think that gates were all the same. I bought an inexpensive quad gate years ago and have used it quite a bit for cleaning up a bit of tape hiss or amp noise during mixing. When I tried to use it for cleaning a vocal track I always felt it was a bit slow on opening up at the top of a...

You know how there are certain things that come in to your life and once they do you realize that you just can't live without them? That was the experience I had when I first heard the L2M Mastering Limiter/Expander from Requisite Audio Engineering. It seemed as if anything I ran through the...

Playing to a click track is a blessing or a curse, but I'm sure every musician or engineer has had to deal with it more than once. For a while I was burdened with one that would only give me 2 bpm intervals, which never seemed quite right, and trying to figure the tempo of a song was always a...

Before I jump into a review of these courses, allow me to tell you little bit about myself. I've been home recording for about 13 years or so, first with a 4-track and an Shure 57, now with an 8-track, a couple of pieces of outboard gear, and a few more mics - nothing too fancy. In the...

The right-honorable Portastudio line has now entered the digital realm, and once again they've produced a well- engineered, affordable product. At the risk of sounding like I'm on the payroll, the 788 responds so well to such a wide variety of needs at such a cheap price that it's...