In a majority of cases, the absolute worst motive for undertaking a DIY electronics project is "cost savings." Gear builds are gratifying for a number of reasons, but factors like economies of scale...
Let's paint a picture. If you are new to painting, let's paint by numbers. If you have been at it awhile, let's explore and start mixing our own colors and use more than just a paintbrush to apply...
My head is spinning these days with all of the available options for the 500-series format. As a kid, Baskin-Robbins and their 31 flavors seemed overwhelming. Generally, I stuck with what I knew was...
Instead of offering eight or more inputs loaded with mic preamps in a never-ending quest for bang-for-buck, some companies are designing two-channel units that put the emphasis on quality rather than...
The Two-V is a double-wide, two-channel preamp module for the 500-series format. It comes painted battleship grey with minimal markings denoting the usual features: polarity, high-pass filter, phantom...
Eventide bills its MixingLink as a "Mic Pre with FX Loop." It is so much more than that! I tried to sum it up technically: It's a mic/line preamp. It's an instrument preamp/DI. It's a headphone amp....
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...
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....
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...
Lately, Chicago-based Black Lion Audio has been earning praise for its sensibly-priced homages to classic audio gear. In particular, the B12A preamp, a half-rack-format API-inspired mic preamp, has...
So there are two companies called API? Sort of. The original API, or Automated Processes, Inc., started manufacturing modular mixing consoles in 1969 and moved on to develop the 2520 op-amp,...
The original Apollo [Tape Op #95] is a groundbreaking unit that combines real-time UAD plug-in processing, A/D and D/A conversion, and mic preamps in a single 1RU-height box. While the original unit...
