Recording - October 2011 - 27

the High and Low ends. Having peak or shelf eq on the Highs and Lows gives you either a ballpark-but-great-sounding way to tame rumble or squeal, or a very sexy “tilt control” for adjusting the overall tone balance of your source, adding a bit of air or turning a shrieky signal into something a bit more rounded and pleasing. The Low shelf, combined with the HPF, lets you keep low-end ballsiness in bassheavy signals without letting through the really deep rumble and crud that obscures details. The optocompressor is equally easy to use, and its simple controls and responsive, intuitive metering make it a joy to set up—and a great teaching tool for the basics of dynamics control, too! The Attack and Release settings let the compressor be as grabby as you need it to be, or let you sneak attack transients through while controlling ringout and adding sustain. It’s exceptionally clean and dignified, even when cranked to its highest Ratio settings, and the Output Trim gives you more than enough makeup gain to keep your levels where they need to go. It’s not a crushing-levels-vibey compressor at all, but is meant to keep your levels where they belong in a genteel manner, and it does so beautifully.

Mic tests—lessons learned Using the Mic input, I tried a variety of signals through several different mics: acoustic guitar, mandolin, and mountain dulcimer, winds, hand percussion, and vocals. I don’t have a lot to add to the pages of editorial we’ve given the Model 101 and its children as a mic preamp family; as always, signals were exceptionally clean and clear without being brittle or sterile. With the m103, even (especially?) before you get to the eq or compressor, what you get out is what you put in... only somehow, magically, more so. It would be untrue to call the 101 a “straight wire with gain” and nothing else, but what it does to signals serves (at least to my ears) to add a sense of clarity and detail that lifts the signal out of mere “realism” and up into something just that much sweeter. No, it’s not a super-vibey-tubey-gooey pre, but it’s not clinical or sterile either. It’s clean... not so much “dressing in a white hazmat suit before entering a clean room” clean as “gazing into an untouched mountain lake” clean. (And here I’d promised myself I’d try to skip the poetry when discussing preamps! Sorry, folks.) One of the most interesting things that cropped up in my tests is how the m103 behaved with mics of varying quality.

Everyone agrees that good sound must start with a good source in a good room, and everyone agrees that fancier signal processors or plug-ins are literally the last thing you should worry about in improving your tracks. But in the middle, what’s your best investment to make your tracks better... a better mic, or a better preamp? Most folks would say the mic, since it’s first in the signal chain; read Paul J. Stamler’s article “Just Like Downtown” (available for free at www.recordingmag .com, in our Resource Library under Your Studio > Microphones) to grasp the principle behind this stance. But Bruce Kaphan (recently featured in our Sound Advice monthly e-newsletter) states firmly that in the entire audio chain, the preamp is key—a fantastic preamp can make a decent mic sound good and a great mic sound stellar, but a low-quality preamp will ruin the sound of even the best mics. Working with the m103 made me revisit the idea, as its behavior with two mics in particular gave me food for thought. First was my battered old Shure SM57. The SM57 may be the ultimate example of the adage that where mics are concerned, price does not determine quality... while very affordable, it is in my opinion the one mic everyone should own. It’s a dynamic

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Recording - October 2011

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