Gear Reviews

By now, you’ve doubtless heard me complain countless times about the exceedingly hyped sound of “lifestyle” headphones, earbuds, and in-ears. It doesn’t matter how much you want to spend, or what features you desire — most headphones on the market these days are anything but accurate. So, I always...

The Micparts S-25 is a side-address condenser mic available as a kit. All that’s required is solder, a soldering iron, and some basic hand tools. The JFET in the kit is even manually biased by Micparts. If you don’t have two hours to spare for the build, you can also purchase the mic prebuilt, at...

Don’t tell my wife I just bought another compressor. She thinks I have “enough” or maybe even “too many,” and I have to admit, I’ve been pretty lucky on the compressor front. I’ve got a bunch of great stuff — old and new — but I don’t have anything that does what this one does.

The AMTEC 852 is a...

Acoustic Geometry has completed some nice upgrades to the already outstanding, first-generation Curve Diffusor [Tape Op #88]. The Curve is a surface or stand–mountable acoustical treatment product that resembles a lengthwise slice of a giant pipe. Unlike single-function treatments, Curve is an...

I recently purchased a used ADC1 (non-USB). I wrote Benchmark to say how much I liked it. I got a reply asking if I wanted to demo the new ADC1 USB to verify if my old model was still up to spec! Who does that? They had no idea I had written a review of their DAC2 [Tape Op #97], yet they offered a...

My tech time is very limited, and I’d rather spend whatever time I do have working on music. So, when I wired my new studio space four years ago, I chose DB25 patchbays. I’ve never regretted this decision. DB25 bays cost more than traditional soldered or punchdown bays, but they’re flexible and...

Kurt Ballou [Tape Op #76] showed me these gadgets a few years ago. They’re simple, 7’’ boom arms with a clamp that securely holds the boom on the shaft of a mic stand (or pipe, railing, etc.). Next to the clamp is On-Stage’s trademark Posi-Lok knob, which allows the boom to be rotated 300°. I use...

The fact that you can buy the Yamaha TF1, a 32-channel digital mixer with 20 analog input channels, 16 analog outs, moving faders, touchscreen control, advanced networking, and an onboard 34-channel USB audio interface to boot — for a penny under $2000 — blows me away. Less than a decade ago, the...

We recently did a session here at Panoramic House with Jerry Harrison (Talking Heads, Live) producing a great band called Le Butcherettes. Jerry has a studio near us with a mix/edit room and a separate tracking room; and both rooms have Burl Mothership converters [Tape Op #84] tailored to each...

The SSL 4000 G Series bus compressor has been copied, emulated, reworked, and rehashed by both hardware and software manufacturers for years now. It seems every plug-in developer has their own take on the stereo compressor, and I’d bet most readers have at least one in their library. So, to be...

The Neve 1073 is arguably the most famous and cherished preamp/EQ channel strip of all time. It has been endlessly cloned, copied, updated, and tweaked by countless manufacturers trying to cash in on the mythological status of this piece of recording gear. There is good reason for all the hype, as...

Switzerland's Merging Technologies is best known for their Pyramix, VCube, and Ovation workstations. But the company also makes world-class converters. Merging's flagship Horus is a network-enabled interface that offers AES/EBU and MADI digital I/O, as well as Audio over IP (AoIP) using...

Rather than do the usual review discussing the feature set and my qualitative judgments of how this synthesizer sounds, I'm going to list eight reasons why I think this instrument is one of the best pieces of new gear for making music that I've seen in the last ten years.

1. Price. When I...

Wolfgang Palm invented wavetable synthesis in the late '70's which he used in the PPG Wave synthesizer that was hugely popular in the '80's with artists like Thomas Dolby and Frankie Goes to Hollywood. He later went to work at Waldorf who ended up continuing to develop wavetable...

So I was at the studio holiday party a while back. All the kids were looking at the vinyl releases on display. Out of curiosity, I surveyed, "What turntable do you use?" To my surprise, only one person of the two dozen I asked actually owned a record player. The rest purchased vinyl to...

Sometimes the simplest of tools can have a significant impact on one’s creative output. One such tool for me has been a guitar amp attenuator — a.k.a. a “hotplate” — which I’ve used in a variety of recording and live music scenarios. So, when my trusty but well-used attenuator bit the dust, I knew...

There are certain criteria I look for in gear that I choose to use and write about. It has to have excellent value and be useful in a wide variety of situations. Let’s face it. Money is tight for most of us in the business of music-making these days, and we need to invest smartly. I prefer to buy...

It seems like the market has never been more saturated with various types of new recording equipment attempting to emulate vintage gear. Vintage microphone recreations are hot right now — especially modern takes on the Neumann U 47. Not true clones, but adaptations. Really, adaptations are the only...

If I had to choose a single channel-insert plug-in for mixing, iZotope Neutron would be at the top of my list. Neutron, at its heart, is a multi-module channel strip. It includes four modules — Equalizer, Compressor, Transient Shaper, and Exciter — that can be enabled, disabled, and reordered in...