Recording - December 2009 - 12

The tried, the tested, and the true, for your holiday giving and receiving Over the course of any given year, we get many more products than we have room to review in depth, yet quite a number of those offerings are deserving of a mention in our pages. For this year’s Gift Guide, we’re skipping the press releases and marketing hype, and instead we’re bringing you tiny reviews of 33 fun and affordable products we’ve actually tested and used in studio sessions and on stage. If it’s in here, we’ve tried it and liked it, so leave this magazine out where your family, friends and other likely gift-buyers can find it, knowing that whatever they choose for you from these pages, you’ll come out a winner. Happy holidays and best wishes for a bright 2010! —The Editors Reviews by Mike Metlay, Scott Dorsey, Paul Vnuk Jr., Lorenz Rychner, and Nick Casares you can switch between a pair of balanced TRS inputs or a single stereo headphone jack, letting you hook up to stereo line outs or to a console’s headphone out with a single balanced TRS cable. Power is provided by a 16 VAC wallwart. A single white LED indicates power on (and doubles as a studio lighting fixture—it’s really bright!). That’s all pretty standard stuff—where the 454 stands out is in its audio specs. With a 10 Hz–120 kHz frequency response ±1 dB, very low crosstalk, and gobs of clean headroom, the 454 takes even the wimpiest headphone output signal, lets you set it to a low but clean level so it doesn’t distort, and then boosts it as loud as you care to go and then some. While the 454 worked beautifully with my more modern lower-impedance headphones, its real chance to shine came when I dusted off my old AKG K240M phones. These classic 600 ohm phones take a lot of oomph to run cleanly, and haven’t done well with the headphone amplifiers on a lot of newer gear. It was a pleasure and a surprise to hear how well the HeadPod 454 drove them, with lots of punch and clarity. I got compliments from visiting musicians who wanted to know what was making their headphone mixes sound so good. Between those compliments and the chance to get my K240M phones back into service again without compromises, I give the HeadPod 454 a clear thumbs up.—MM Big Fish Audio Divinity, Earth Tone, Found Percussion, and Electron Smasher $99.95 each; www.bigfishaudio.com New loop libraries are always a great stocking-stuffer for the recording musician; they usually don’t require specific software or fancy installers, work with any DAW even if some are more loop-centric than others, and are an affordable and fun way to expand your studio’s sonic palette. Big Fish Audio has released dozens of new titles in the past year; these are four of my favorites. For each title, the quoted size includes all samples in all formats—Apple Loops, ACIDized WAV, REX2, RMX, except in the case of Divinity that doesn’t come in RMX format and has single-sample hits and premade drum kits for EXS24, Reason, and Ableton Live as well. The actual number of usable samples won’t change much from format to format, but the total file size per format will be somewhat smaller than the total. All of these libraries install by simple drag and drop (aside from RMX files, which have a simple installer included) and have a standard Big Fish license, allowing them for use in original compositions without royalties, with no provision for resale or use in sample libraries. Divinity: World Percussion is a 4.3 GB collection from Bunker 8, whose libraries have been reviewed many times in Recording. It includes folders with performances separated by instrument: tayan and bayan Aphex HeadPod 454 $249; www.aphex.com With so many inexpensive or compact mixers out there providing only one headphone output (or worse, a single output for either headphones or a set of studio monitors!), headphone distribution boxes are a handy add-on for multiple listeners who want to be able to set their own levels. Some are as fancy as small consoles, with multiple blendable inputs or perhaps an effects send for “confidence” reverb in the singer’s cans. The HeadPod 454 from Aphex takes the opposite tack: it’s small, simple, and puts all of its resources into high-quality audio. Housed in a compact all-steel tabletop chassis, the HeadPod 454 offers four 1/4" TRS outputs, each with its own volume pot, and a Master volume pot for gain-matching with the source. On the back,RECORDING DECEMBER 2009

http://www.bigfishaudio.com http://www.aphex.com

Recording - December 2009

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Recording - December 2009