Recording - December 2010 - 25

meters on your preamps, but for those working in a DAW, including myself, the peak indicator is fine. Four channels of clean and noisefree gain at an affordable price make the Q-Pre a good inexpensive way to add preamps to your rig. The Q-Amp is a 4-channel headphone amp with a simple layout of four identical controls for each channel: A volume knob, A/B mix switch, 1/4" headphone output, and 1/8" headphone output. The rear panel has two sets of 1/4" inputs for a total of two stereo or mono mixes. Using the Q-Amp is very straightforward and I was up and running with stereo mixes in a matter of minutes. Each mix can also run in mono by simply supplying only a left channel input (the signal gets summed to mono at the headphone outputs). Each channel can be set to listen to either mix A or mix B, great for creating two separate headphone mixes. The 1/8" headphone output is a nice touch that cuts down on the adapters needed for all different types of headphones. The Q-Amp is capable of almost ridiculous amounts of gain (this box is loud) and delivers clear, distortion-free mixes. No studio should be without a solid headphone amp and the Q-Amp is a great no-frills choice. A quality DI, preamp, and headphone mixer are audio essentials that every studio needs. At a street price of $99.99 each the Q-series delivers great “bang for the buck” to the budget conscious buyer who wants to expand their recording rig.—NC Akai APC20 $399 ($199 street); www.akaipro.com We reviewed the APC40, Akai’s custom controller for Ableton Live, in our August 2009 issue. The new APC20 is, roughly, half an APC40 for about half the price. It takes up less room than its larger sibling, offers roughly half the controllers, but with some clever paging, does almost as much... including at least one trick the APC40 couldn’t do when it was first released. The APC20 looks like the left half of the APC40, with a grid of 8 x 5 Clip multicolor-LED Launch buttons, five Scene Launch buttons, eight sets of three channel-specific function buttons, nine faders, and a Cue Level pot. With some clever relabeling and a Shift key, the existing buttons, which were dedicated to specific functions on the APC40, now do double duty, including transport control, screen navigation, track selection, and fader reassignment to other functions besides track volume. As with the APC40, you can manually reassign any control to do something other than what it does by default, using Live’s own MIDI Mapping function, but if you do, that control no longer “moves” with the controls that navigate the Session View to give you access to more than eight Tracks and five Scenes. The paging system is quite elegant; selecting a function never takes more than two button presses. You can use the faders to quickly control track levels, pan, Send A, B, and C, and three User control sets (easily assigned in Live itself). This setup beats the APC40’s in that it allows quick access to three Sends rather than two, and the User assignments allow you to quickly set up control of Return Tracks, which the APC40 couldn’t control at all. Very handy! Our gripe list is very small; the navigation buttons (used to move the focus of the APC20 around the virtual mix in Live, between sets of channels and Scenes) are labeled with text rather than graphics, so they take a little practice to find in a hurry, and you can’t store User assignments for the Cue Level encoder, a minor annoyance. But everything works right out of the box with no driver installation; you just need a recent enough version of Live to know what the APC20 is, and there’s a copy of Live Lite packaged with the APC20 to get you started. Hardcore Live users will miss the assignable encoders and crossfader on the APC40, but most of them will have picked up the larger unit already. For users who want a convenient way of launching Clips and controlling the mix in Session View, which frankly is the core of what you need to do quickly in Live anyway, the APC20 will do the job handily at a very manageable price.—MM

MOTU ZBox $39.95; www.motu.com When Avid’s Eleven Rack was released, its True-Z impedance matching input made an impact on the considerations we take when trying to faithfully reproduce authentic tones with amplifier emulation. Up until now, in order to benefit from this technology a recording musician would have to buy the powerful but very costly Eleven Rack. MOTU’s ZBox offers a portable, simple to use and universal way to simulate the impedance of the Hi and Low inputs found on many classic Fender amps, to remove impedance mismatches and help give you better emulated guitar tones. The ZBox doesn’t require batteries, software drivers, or extra cables—you just take the included 1/4" plug on the 16-inch cable and connect it to the input of your audio interface, wirless transmitter, mixer, PA system, etc. Then you simply plug the 1/4" cable from your guitar into either the Hi-Z or Lo-Z input. You can have the stompboxes you’d like between the two, just like you would in a typical guitar rig. I plugged the ZBox into my Black Lion Audio modified Digi 003 and straight into Pro Tools. A/B-ing the difference between Hi-Z and Lo-Z I did notice a perceptible difference in the signal that can be heard when monitoring a direct signal. When bypassing the ZBox and going straight into my audio interface I found that the direct signal was very clean, not as in “lacking in noise” but as in “lacking in vibe”... a bit louder, glassier, and

RECORDING DECEMBER 2010

25


http://www.akaipro.com http://www.motu.com

Recording - December 2010

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Recording - December 2010

Recording - December 2010
Fade In
Contents
Talkback
Recording’s 2010 Holiday Gift Guide
Theme Music for TV—A Production Report
Royer Labs R-101 Ribbon Microphone
Recording SFX—A Career Option?
Primacoustic IsoTools
Avenson Audio IsoDI
Getting Your Music Heard In Today’sCommercial Culture
Preview: Yamaha AvantGrand
It’s Your Music—Know Your Rights.Chapter 9: Trademark Basics
Sonoma Wire Works GuitarJack Model 1and FourTrack 4.0.1
Readers' Tapes
Advertiser Index
Fade Out
Recording - December 2010 - Recording - December 2010
Recording - December 2010 - Cover2
Recording - December 2010 - 1
Recording - December 2010 - Fade In
Recording - December 2010 - 3
Recording - December 2010 - Contents
Recording - December 2010 - 5
Recording - December 2010 - Talkback
Recording - December 2010 - 7
Recording - December 2010 - Recording’s 2010 Holiday Gift Guide
Recording - December 2010 - 9
Recording - December 2010 - 10
Recording - December 2010 - 11
Recording - December 2010 - 12
Recording - December 2010 - 13
Recording - December 2010 - 14
Recording - December 2010 - 15
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Recording - December 2010 - 28
Recording - December 2010 - 29
Recording - December 2010 - 30
Recording - December 2010 - 31
Recording - December 2010 - 32
Recording - December 2010 - 33
Recording - December 2010 - Theme Music for TV—A Production Report
Recording - December 2010 - 35
Recording - December 2010 - 36
Recording - December 2010 - 37
Recording - December 2010 - 38
Recording - December 2010 - 39
Recording - December 2010 - Royer Labs R-101 Ribbon Microphone
Recording - December 2010 - 41
Recording - December 2010 - Recording SFX—A Career Option?
Recording - December 2010 - 43
Recording - December 2010 - Primacoustic IsoTools
Recording - December 2010 - 45
Recording - December 2010 - Avenson Audio IsoDI
Recording - December 2010 - 47
Recording - December 2010 - Getting Your Music Heard In Today’sCommercial Culture
Recording - December 2010 - 49
Recording - December 2010 - 50
Recording - December 2010 - 51
Recording - December 2010 - 52
Recording - December 2010 - 53
Recording - December 2010 - 54
Recording - December 2010 - 55
Recording - December 2010 - Preview: Yamaha AvantGrand
Recording - December 2010 - 57
Recording - December 2010 - It’s Your Music—Know Your Rights.Chapter 9: Trademark Basics
Recording - December 2010 - 59
Recording - December 2010 - 60
Recording - December 2010 - 61
Recording - December 2010 - Sonoma Wire Works GuitarJack Model 1and FourTrack 4.0.1
Recording - December 2010 - 63
Recording - December 2010 - Readers' Tapes
Recording - December 2010 - Advertiser Index
Recording - December 2010 - 66
Recording - December 2010 - 67
Recording - December 2010 - 68
Recording - December 2010 - 69
Recording - December 2010 - 70
Recording - December 2010 - 71
Recording - December 2010 - Fade Out
Recording - December 2010 - Cover3
Recording - December 2010 - Cover4
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