Gear Reviews

To begin this review, I first must admit that this is the most expensive piece of recording equipment we have yet reviewed in Tape Op. It is also, outside of my home, the most expensive purchase I have ever made in my life. $56,000 is a lot of money - and our readers who have invested in...

A few months ago, Blue Rock studios in Wimberley, Texas hosted a shootout of several microphones geared toward lead vocals. The high-dollar microphones were judged by such local luminaries as David Hough from Austin City Limits, Tristan Rhodes from Rupert Neve Designs, Mike Castoro from Wunder...

I've got problems. Since building my project studio last fall, I haven't been able to nail down a monitoring setup that "feels" right, and my mixes are not referencing as well as I'd like. I was sure the primary culprits were early reflections from my side walls and a...

Brent Averill Enterprises, simply known as BAE these days, is perhaps the best-known builder of Neve-style preamps, and for good reason as their designs indeed capture the behavior, tone, and appearance of Neve preamps beautifully. For years I have used a pair of their 1073s, and they have...

The Little Devils are designer Wade Chandler's new modules for the 500-series rack system. The Compressor has all the controls to which you've become accustomed in a Chandler compressor, and the 4-band Equalizer gets some of its inspiration from a 1081, but it's not a 1081 clone. The...

The UAD systems by Universal Audio have been host to some of the best plug-ins available (in VST, AU, RTAS) for a number of years now, via their "Powered Plug-In" cards. Usually these are PCI-based cards installed inside a computer (they handle the DSP for authorized plug-ins), but in the...

Using a ribbon microphone can be a tricky bit of business. Unlike dynamics that can take anything thrown at them or condensers that can provide whisper quiet operation, ribbons take a bit more care and thought to use. They don't like it when it's too loud -or it better not be too quiet...

I've owned enough Pro Tools non-HD rigs (002, Mbox, Mbox 2 Pro, Micro, Transit) to know that one of my biggest complaints about the LE line is the lack of automatic delay compensation when using plug-ins. In the much more expensive HD format, this feature can be enabled, but in LE the user...

This is a great, handy device that tames the resonant peak of your guitar pickup. Electronically and ergonomically designed specifically for pedal steel players -there's a handy clip for attaching it to your steel leg, and the I/O jacks are on the top and bottom -it ultimately works great with...

At $9.99, this is the most expensive app on my iPhone, but it's worth every penny. In fact, having now used it for a few months, I'd pay twice this and still feel like it's a great value. I've been working on a record with an artist called Sea of Bees, and almost every song used...

Over the years, I've bought and sold (after upgrading) a fair amount of audio gear, but I've kept every piece of gear I have from Summit -an MPC-100A mic preamp/compressor (Tape Op #21), an EQP-200B stereo EQ, and a TLA-50 compressor (#31) -all of which get used on almost every session....

Although I am a huge fan of Audio Ease's Altiverb convolution reverb plug-in, I have to confess that I initially dismissed this plug-in as something a bit gimmicky and easily replicated with a good set of high and low-pass filters. Boy, was I wrong. In my defense however, I think the name of...