Gear Reviews

By now, we are all familiar with the Rupert Neve Designs Portico Series of processors and RND's big-daddy 5088 console [Tape Op #73]. Over the last few years, these products have proved themselves worthy of the Rupert Neve badge and are now staples in million-dollar facilities and project...

The worlds of project studio and commercial studio have collided in a big way over the last few years, and now we are seeing the same convergence with gear that was developed for the mastering lab finding its way into the personal studio. It only makes sense; due to magazines like Tape Op, online...

Perhaps in a bid to thumb his nose at Thermionic Culture's usurpation of avian nomenclature, Dave Hill has come out of the Crane Song witness-protection program with a new sideline of self- labeled gizmos that have nothing to do with birds. They still have a lot to do with really good-sounding...

When I first purchased my RME Fireface UCX audio interface [Tape Op #88], I tried it in Class Compliant mode with my iPad 2 running MultiTrack DAW by Harmonicdog. With Harmonicdog's various limitations in its version 1.0 release, the novelty of recording on the iPad quickly wore off....

In the land of DAWs, we have become obsessed with infusing some analog-ness back into our productions. Obviously, we still require some analog gear to record acoustic sources, but the search has been on for the best console, summing amp, transformer saturation, or whatever the magic pill is that...

I have way too many mic preamps. The problem is that I like lots of different flavors. We have Neve, API, Chandler, Daking, Hardy, Summit, UREI, Sony, Amek - in some cases several different ones of each. At Chase Park Transduction (Athens, GA), we have two rooms, both with Sony MXP-3036 consoles....

The modestly-sized control room of my personal studio is acoustically treated with a Primacoustic Primakit [Tape Op #36], twelve wood-panel RealTraps [#36], nine broadband RealTraps Mini/MondoTraps [#38, #48, #85], four large clouds from Acoustical Solutions [#37], and an array of Auralex...

SONAR X1 [Tape Op #82] was a major change from the previous eight or so iterations of SONAR. X1 looked, operated, and felt very different from its predecessors, which were so... Windows looking, with an overabundance of text boxes and buttons along the top toolbar. The legacy UI was functional, but...

The brainiacs at Radial Engineering can't leave well-enough alone. Last year, they reinvented the 500-series rack with their Workhorse rack and mixer [Tape Op #85]. Now they've gone off and released several more innovative ways to house our 500- series modules. I recently purchased three...

Following up on the success of the MA-300 large-diaphragm tube mic [Tape Op #87], Mojave recently released a FET version. As was the case with the MA-200 - tube version first, then roll out the FET. The beauty of Mojave's strategy is that they now have a serious line-up of microphones that...