Gear Reviews

I read the letter in the last issue of Tape Op complaining that the reviews in this magazine tend to skew towards the positive. I gave it some thought, and I consider it a fair observation. I would have loved to give the Roll Music RMS755 Super Stereo Compressor a negative review to conspicuously...

Let me start out by saying that my experience with small-diaphragm tube condensers has been limited. I've never owned one but had on occasion used the McHugh Military tube pencil that The Hangar owns. John Peluso sent me only a single P28 to audition, so I felt handicapped in not being able to...

For this review, I concerned myself with one question. Can three "blindfolded" listeners tell the difference between Mogami and VOVOX XLR cables? Wow-yes. Test methodology is detailed at the end of this review, but in short, the participants' answers matched up across 8/10 tests....

I hate dragging a mouse to move an onscreen fader during an automation pass. It just seems obtuse-almost as much as dragging a mouse in a circle to turn a virtual knob. I'll draw out the fader moves as lines on graph-mix by eye-before I'll use a mouse-controlled fader, and I actually...

I love great-sounding speakers. I guess you could call me a monitor guy. Ever since I blew up the studio's last pair of NS-10Ms in 1990, I've been on a quest for the perfect tracking and mixing monitor, one which exhibits the rare balance between musicality and accuracy. It's not an...

When I first read about McDSP's Channel G, I made the mistake of dismissing it as a repackaged application. We already own McDSP's Compressor Bank, Equalizers, and Analog Channel, so I figured Channel G was just those components strung together like the Waves Renaissance Channel is. This...

I love my Alesis Masterlink! It's super convenient to be able to record audio to its built-in hard drive and then burn audio CDs or hi-res CD-R archives. I hate my Masterlink! The user interface is terrible. I feel like I'm back in 1985 trying to program a Yamaha DX7. I use the Masterlink...

From micro-limiting to full-on annihilation, the TG12413 has the controls to finesse the sound as precisely as you can hear it, while your signal runs through a classic circuit which sounds the way people hope for when they use the words "vintage" and "warm". If your music store...

Like the rest of the Portico series, the 5043 two-channel compressor is a half-width, 1RU-height design that can be racked horizontally or vertically. Each channel has the expected controls for attack (20 to 75 ms), release (100 ms to 2.5 s), and ratio (1:1 to limit). Not so common is a button to...

I'm sure a lot of you were checking out the online rumor mills about the Digidesign's new 003. Many of the rumor mongers claimed that it wouldn't be much more than a re-skinned Digi 002 (Tape Op #33) manufactured for RoHS compliance with fewer hazardous materials. Well, having now...

When Wunder Audio owner and CM7 creator Mike Castoro was asked to describe his mic, he said it was similar to a Neumann U 47 but better. I would agree. The Wunder Audio CM7 is the best vocal mic I've ever sung through in my life. Period. And the "better" part is in the sound...

Thrifty New Englander that I am, I often check the daily "Stupid Deal" at musiciansfriend.com. It can be pretty hit-or-miss. Usually, the item is something kind of useless, like an entry-level distortion box for twenty bucks or a ten-pack of odd-gauge guitar strings. But sometimes...

In the previous issue, I wrote in my "Gear Geeking" column about selling my Pro Tools HD 2 rig and buying a new 2.66 GHz quad-core Mac Pro, an Apogee Symphony PCIe audio interface card, and one each of Apogee AD-16X and DA-16X converters (A/D and D/A respectively). I already owned an...

Jim Kalamasz has owned and run Spectrum in Florida for over twenty years. Over a decade ago, they were forced to move to a new location, and Jim documented this process on a home video camera. On this DVD, the main people involved (including Ross Alexander who did the acoustic design) watch the...