30 l September 2012
www.prosoundnewseurope.com
studiofeature MODULES IN USE Francesco Cameli, Sphere Studios
to create unique signal paths, parallel processing and let the creative juices flow.”
FILLING UP Not only are you getting a lot of processing in a small space with the 500-series, but you can fill it with any mixture of processors from a wide variety of different manufacturers. Sphere Studios chief engineer Francesco Cameli sees this option to kit out a studio with a variety of flavours at low cost as a key advantage to the format. “The great thing about them is they’re really affordable and they go in racks of tens. You know that anywhere between £500 and £1,000 is your price point for a module. You’re getting a really great bit of kit for the price. So with not an obscene amount of money, say £5k or £6k you can fully populate a 10-slot rack and have 10 different flavours of processing. This has to be a good thing if you want to see a situation where more and more people turn to analogue outboard again.” For all the positives of
working with the 500-series format, there are still a number of compromises that have to be considered when developing modules for the format. Joel Silverman, managing director of Millennia Media, explains that the +/-16V power rails available on the current 500-series restrict the designs. “We can’t put out +32dBu because of the 500- series power supplies, but these days you are usually driving an A-D converter that can only handle about +22dBu so that’s not a real problem.” Mark Loughman, president
of BAE Audio, explains that the racks his company make have had to be modified as more and
“If I was to start my career now I could totally see why you would want to limit yourself to 500-series units,
simply because they take up so little space, and the quality remains really good”
Marcel van Limbeek
more manufacturers take to the format. “There are a couple of suppliers I know that put their LEDs on one rail, and so when you turn these on it draws a certain amount of current. We’ve had to beef our power supply up to over twice its capacity. Whereas before there was only us, API and a few others building these things, now there are a few hundred manufacturers, if only one unit isn’t biased right it can affect all the other channels in the rack.”
Space is another major limiting factor when it comes to the 500- series, modules have to fit into a relatively small footprint. Dan Kennedy, co-founder of Great River Electronics, designed the
MP-500NV, which is a two-space width module. “The MP-500NV is two spaces wide for two reasons. The first is the power restriction for one slot is what the unit needs to operate, with no margin, so going to two slots wide opens up the power budget. The second reason is that I was not going to compromise the sound of the preamp to the modular format, and the output transformer I use in the NV series is bigger than a single slot width. So the two spaces allow all of the power, and enough room for the transformers and necessary shielding to isolate the NV from other adjacent units.”
DOUBLE TAKE BAE too is designing a double- width module. “We’re due to come out with a product that takes more than one space because once you build an EQ or a compressor you need to shrink everything down to fit in that space,” adds Loughman. “Some things will work, but I would rather use a 19-inch unit than compromise on what I was using in that space”. However, Cameli isn’t
Neve 500 modules
convinced that double width modules are a great idea. “There’s still quite a few
GAVIN GOLDBERG(Mick Hucknall, Jim Kerr, Imelda May), who has a production room at Sphere, relies on the API preamps to get his drums punching. “I’ve used the API preamps quite a bit on drums. For more aggressive rocky band-type stuff they’re perfect. When we did White Sunday it was all API and it sounded great, they’re much more in your face than the Neve [88R console in studio 1]. I normally would do kick, snare, OH, bass and guitars on APIs and put toms and room mics up on the board if I’m running out of API channels.” Cameli agrees and uses a combination of the six API 512C preamps and a further six 212 preamps for drum mic’ing. “I generally put the Burl B1s on bass, because you can get them to sound quite retro and they saturate really nicely. They’re really good on drum rooms too if we run out of APIs on the drums channels.” For processing guitar busses Cameli likes to turn to his API EQs. “I use the API 550 A and B EQs a lot, I love them. They always end up on my guitar busses. Sometimes I’ll have two or three guitar busses in a mix. I’ll have the really crunchy stuff with a pair of Cartec EQs [EQP-1A] on them, but then the less distorted stuff and the acoustic guitars will both get a pair of 550s. I’ll tend to use the 550A on the electrics and for the acoustic bus I’ll use the 550Bs as it’s nice to have the extra band on acoustics.” “It was only really working
with Glyn [Johns] that I got how good those API EQs were. He’d make one tiny click
500-series modules that have an obscene amount of stuff on the front, and now there are double and triple width modules the whole real-estate issue is no longer an issue, but that kind of defeats the purpose of having a 500-series because you’re no longer getting as many flavours into the same space.”
As Loughman pointed out, not all 500-series modules are made equally, and not all racks are made to the same standard especially when it comes to the power supply. Radial has gone a step further with the Workhorse range of
of one frequency and that would be enough. You don’t need to do any more than that. In that respect I love the simplicity of the 550 As and Bs. In some ways the B with the four-band has one too many bands. If you need to do more than three things to any one sound there’s something wrong with the sound – that’s how Glyn put it. He’d put in that one click of 2dB at that frequency and it’d either be exactly what was needed or he’d take it out.” Van Limbeek too uses the 550 EQs, but prefers to turn to the API 560B for low-end percussion. “I have two channels of the 10-band graphic EQ [the API 560B]. At first you think it’s not going to be flexible because the frequencies are fixed. But it’s not important, the unit sounds so good, especially on percussive elements. There’s something about API gear that does low-frequency percussive sounds so well. You can boost the low-end and it sounds full and tight at the same time. It works great on snare too where a little boost at 4kHz can really bring out the crack of the instrument.” For compression Cameli is
somewhat spoilt for choice: “I have a compressor fetish, you can never have enough compressors of different flavours in a studio like this, the 527s had just come out and they were reportedly a mono version of the 2500, so I bought a pair. Interestingly I still tend to use them as a stereo pair, but I tend to only use them when I’ve run out of everything else. I have a 2500 which I will always use before the 527s.”
500-series racks, by not only releasing a white paper trying to standardise the 500-series, but also adding new features. “When Radial decided to take the 500-series plunge, the biggest challenge was trying to identify a clear standard. API went through several incarnations before it stabilised and as such, there was no clearly defined standard. It took us a long time to get things sorted out. After a year, we felt the best way to move forward would be to present a white paper of sorts that other manufacturers could employ in order to eventually move towards
t
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48 |
Page 49 |
Page 50 |
Page 51 |
Page 52 |
Page 53 |
Page 54 |
Page 55 |
Page 56 |
Page 57 |
Page 58 |
Page 59 |
Page 60 |
Page 61 |
Page 62 |
Page 63 |
Page 64 |
Page 65 |
Page 66 |
Page 67 |
Page 68 |
Page 69 |
Page 70 |
Page 71 |
Page 72 |
Page 73 |
Page 74 |
Page 75 |
Page 76