Gear Reviews

I have not tried every pair of headphones on the market, but I have tried a lot. I think these Monoprice DJ Style Pro Headphones are the best value out there. Closed-back, high-quality build, great sounding, and strangely inexpensive - I will look no further for tracking headphones. What

As anyone who's seen the TV show Portlandia knows, in our little city, the dream of the 1890s is still alive. People cure their own meats, roast coffee, raise chickens in the backyard, and pickle any food item, but they also build their own mics. Self-described bricoleur, Philip Graham,

New Zealand gear manufacturer Buzz Audio is best known for its REQ-2.2 mastering EQ [Tape Op #71], which some have compared to a classic Sontec. This impressive reputation made me curious enough to buy Buzz Audio's top-of-the-line compressor, which has achieved less visibility so far. The

The Grace brothers (Michael and Eben) are well-known for their uncompromised designs. I've been a big fan of Grace since JB introduced me to the Model 101 preamp [Tape Op #27] five years ago, and I've used some "Grace" on nearly all the recordings I've made since then. A few years ago,

With every recording session, there's one piece of the puzzle that never rests; it's constantly in use, informing every decision that you make - and that's your monitor controller. You'll use different mics, mic preamps, and dynamics processors; switch between speakers; and order food from

Summing mixers. They really weren't considered a decade ago, and now it's one of the main product areas that seem to have constant growth and development. Although the debate rages on, many feel that the sonic benefits of analog summing are well worth the extra expense, as opposed to just

The QWERTY keyboard that I use with my DAW is a fully-programmable Cherry SPOS G86-61410 (Tape Op #56) designed for use with Point of Sale register stations. Any keycode, key combination, or sequence of keys (up to 10 keycodes each) can be assigned to any of the hardware keys, and these

Past reviews in Tape Op have covered external hard drive storage systems with RAID capability for redundancy in case of drive failure. Even if you're doing daily backups, the loss of one day's worth of audio recordings could be disastrous, and a RAID can reduce the possibility of such a

Last year, I upgraded the pair of Ultimate Support MS-45B2 monitor stands (Tape Op #49) in my personal studio to the current, second-generation model in Ultimate Support's studio lineup, the MS-90/45B. For months now, I've been planning on writing a review, but I couldn't find the words.

Rupert Neve is a name that's been around in the recording world for quite a while now, and it holds a lot of weight. Few names are as synonymous with audio design, but when it came time to release a new series of gear in a new millennium, Rupert Neve Designs made the decision to try

Monofilter is a useful tool for managing bass frequencies and correcting phase-coherence issues. Monofilter re-aligns and balances low frequencies, resulting in a louder, more focused, and better defined mix, while leaving the aesthetic of the mix intact.

This venerable DAW, which was introduced originally for the Atari ST in 1989, was last covered in Tape Op in 2010 (Tape Op #75); Garrett Haines and I cowrote the Cubase 5 review. For this latest version of Cubase, I asked senior contributor and longtime Cubase user Scott Evans to be the

I've been using analog synthesizer filters to process audio ever since I bought a PAiA modular synth in the mid '80s, and you'll get no argument from me if you were to say the venerable Moog filter is one of the best sounding filters ever made. So when Moog introduced The Ladder, a

I have not been excited about a new mic preamp in a long time, especially a solid-state one. You know what I mean? Doesn't it feel like in the last 10 years or so, we witnessed an explosion in the mic preamp category, and now again in the 500-series format, and some of these new products

First looks can be deceiving, and the Radial Q3 is anything but what I initially imagined it to be. My first impression upon seeing the 500-series module was of an Auditronics-style 3- band inductive coil EQ, similar to the Purple ODD (Tape Op #77). The physical layout is similar: four

This book presents a large body of knowledge and countless insider-tips from an award-winning commercial audio designer. Before this book, complete information about original audio circuit design was notoriously hard to find. Audio circuit engineering is not taught as a degree in any

Fleetwood Mac's 1977 album Rumours sold over 40 million copies, topped charts around the world, and won a Grammy for Album of the Year. Ken Caillat, along with Richard Dashut and the band, produced this album over a span of 12 months in a number of classic studios: Wally Heider Studios

Introduced in 1976, the Ampex ATR-102 2-track tape recorder is often cited as the finest tape handler invented. Not limited to one width, users can swap head-stacks and guides, permitting a single machine to handle 1/4'', 1/2'', and even 1'' (when modified) tape. For decades, the ATR-102

The Federal AM-864/U was made for the US Army in the '40s and '50s for use in AM radio broadcasting. Like most obscure, vibey pieces of vintage gear, these have recently become prohibitively expensive, and replacement parts are scarce. Moreover, it's nearly impossible to tell which version