Recording - December 2016 - 24

many of my reviews, you'll know I'm very cautious about saying a microphone
bests or goes toe to toe with mics twice its price, but the more I use it, the more
I think Delphos is one such mic. It stands comfortably alongside many
$1500-$1800 mics in my collection, and now it looks as classy as it sounds!
With the Delphos, the Roswell team have upped their game nicely... which is
awesome when you consider their game was already quite good!-PV

Samson Conspiracy
$149.99; www.samsontech.com

Kansas where UFOs have been sighted, in
keeping with the Roswell naming convention).
Like all Roswell mics, the Delphos is a
hybrid of Asian metalwork along with a USAdesigned and populated circuit board and
hand-chosen parts. The mic is assembled,
tuned and tweaked in California, by Matt
McGlynn (guru of the fantastic recordinghacks
.com and microphone-parts.com websites)
and his team.
In the past few months Roswell has started
to transition away from the standard black
utilitarian bodies with painted-on logos, in
favor of a new enamel finish with a classy
new Roswell badge. The Delphos 71/4" x 2"
brass body is now finished in a dark
sparkled midnight blue. It features a brushed
silver mesh head basket that houses the
34mm center-terminated K67-style capsule. It
has two switchable polar pattern choices of
cardioid and omni, and a -10 dB pad.
It offers a frequency response of
20-16,000 Hz, a 45 mV/Pa sensitivity,
200Ω impedance, 86 dBA signal-to-noise
ratio, and <12 dBA of equivalent noise. It
has a gently boosted low end from 20 to
100 Hz, then a flat mid response to 1 kHz,
where it rises to a 1-2 dB bump from 3 to 4
kHz followed by a wider, even 1 dB bump
from 8 to 16 kHz and a steep rolloff.
The Delphos now comes with a high-quality
suspension mount that features a semi-circular
open-front design to allow for better placement options. Both come in a dense foam
lined case for storage.
Like the Aurora, the Delphos is a jack-of-alltrades microphone that sounds good on pretty much any source from vocals to guitars,
drums, and anywhere you may desire a
clean, honest capture that is rich and full but
not too colored or imposing. If you read
24

RECORDING DECEMBER 2016

The Conspiracy is a
desktop USB MIDI control
surface for Mac and
Windows. Most of the
folks I've shown it to in the
months I've been working
with it do a double take;
one thing's for sure, it
doesn't look much like the
competition!
As you can see in the
photo, the Conspiracy
offers a lot of different controls for your DAW or plugins, but their arrangement
is startling. There are six
faders, four horizontal and
two vertical, each with its own accompanying encoder (endless), plus ten buttons, a crossfader, four arrow buttons, three transport buttons, and a touchsensitive XY pad, surrounding a 5 x 5 grid of backlit trigger pads. That's 40
controls and 25 pads, all in a lightweight and fairly compact bus-powered
package. Programming of each control can be done with the push/turn dial
and 2-line display in the upper right corner, or you can download a free editor
program for Mac and Windows.
The buttons and trigger pads have red, green, and blue LEDs to indicate if
they're touched or turned on. Normally one thinks "red/green/blue = RGB =
can display any color", but in this case, the available colors are literally red,
green, or blue. All of the buttons and pads can be set to momentary or toggle
(push-on/push-off) action, and can send MIDI Notes or MIDI Control Change
messages. The pads send aftertouch data (defeatable on a per-pad basis);
when set to CC mode, the value of the CC sent depends on pad velocity, an
interesting choice for synth parameter control. If you plan to use the grid as
MIDI CC switches, you can globally set the velocity curve and sensitivity so any
touch of the pad will produce a 127 data value, as you'd expect from a button.
Speaking of global settings, besides pad sensitivity and velocity curve, you
can set a global MIDI Channel, or have each control transmit on its own
Channel. There's also a MIDI Reset (panic button) feature, which would be
handier if you could get to it immediately rather than via push/turn/turn/push/
push/Enter.
The pads are reasonably responsive to both velocity and aftertouch; it takes a
while to set them all up with MIDI notes, but 25 pads equals two octaves of
chromatic keys, a nice round number. I found the control layout very interesting
to use with virtual instruments; rather than having rows of knobs and rows of
faders that you have to look at to see what you're touching, the Conspiracy's
crazy-quilt layout means you can find your way around the control surface by
touch without having to look at it, a design philosophy championed by the late
Don Buchla. The faders have a nice resistance, the knobs are smooth, the buttons are squishy but positive, and the crossfader is just slippery enough for easy
deck swapping. I found the XY pad fairly coarse and difficult to set precisely,
but that's my only downcheck where performance is concerned.
Control surfaces are handy beasts to have with any DAW; the Conspiracy is
worth a closer look, because it brings these functions within reach of any budget and does so in an unusual and appealing way.-MM

http://www.samsontech.com http://www.microphone-parts.com

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Recording - December 2016