A friend of mine (the owner of the FX I occasionally bass for) is moving and needs to stash some of his gear-mountain in the interim and offered me the use of a Very Large Box for the immediate future.

Four channel strips + PSU, racked up with outputs, pulled from an AMEK/TAC Magnum console- supposed to have some okay EQ- with the preamp section completely gutted and rebuilt. The mod, which replaces the whole preamp, from what I've been able to ascertain, is the preamp from the AMEK 2500 console, or a version thereof, one of the handful of things Mr. Neve actually designed for them. The name doesn't matter- people attach it to anything AMEK related regardless of how little he had to do with most of what they made- and it's not a 1073, 1081 or the like, or at all similar.

'Spoda sound pretty good, though, and the little I've played around with these- they wound up on some Garda demos a couple years back- they do. I'm curious about the EQ, too. The last time I EQed on the way in using my own gear (not some rockstar's SSL) was on a Mackie desk.

So yeah, random geekery. Gonna mic some shit up and see how it sounds.

Interesting. Moar knobs and jobbers is usually a good thing anyhow, from a purely aesthetic standpoint, even if it sounds basically the same for functional porpoises, so it is difficult to go wrong with such a contraption, methinks.

if i'm not mistaken, aren't the amek things related to neotek somehow?

i dun remember.. but if so-- i've used relatives of the ameks. they were loverly sounding.. but i think ANY channel strips would be a welcome thing to have lying around to make music through!

Beats the hell out of me. They might be. I know there's the Neve connection; Mr. Neve designed a handful of consoles and various stuff for them over the years. One of the dudes who ran the company took the aforementioned Neve preamp circuit and offers a board with said, or a variant thereof, as a replacement for damn near everything AMEK made that didn't already have it or better. Regardless of its lineage, it's supposed to be a pretty nice piece of kit, so I'm totally not going to argue.

Oh, twist my arm, force these channel strips upon me. Thank you mistress, may I please have another?

We should pull one of 'em and take a look at how heavily it's been re-worked. Line amp, too? EQ? They all have the logo badge for the mod (Langley Designs, Mr. Langley being the AMEK guy) at the end of the channel strip opposite the fader, which makes me wonder if these haven't been entirely replaced with different circuits? Just for curiosity's sake. I'll ask when I pick 'em up. His place looks like a guitar store anyhow; what's one more thing on the bench for a few minutes?

Probably not the moast worstest things to fall into one's hands when you're making a couple records and engineering random shit for people, either, you're right.

The channel strips are sitting next to me. My friend forgot the PSU though. So he'll be dropping that off. But yes, channel strips.

Phase reverse, pad, mic/line, and phantom on every channel. Re: the EQ section:

HF- 6/12k selectable
MF1- labeled from 600hz to 18khz, but they go higher and lower a bit, narrow/wide Q selectable
MF2- see above from 150hz to 4khz
LF- 60/120hz selectable

And lots of console feature that aren't so useful racked- 24 busses, 6 auxes, level control for tape ins, separate monitoring levels (on a pot, not a small fader), etc. Should be fun.

The PSU finally got dropped off today while I was out. I was able to give these a whirl briefly when I got home, even if only on bass DI and spoken word. Compared to the pres in my Focusrite, I'd say they're thicker sounding and more "3-d"- even on DI'd bass I get a sense of space, the sound existing in a space rather than being right up flat in front of you. It's an interesting intangible thing.

I'd say they're a touch dark overall, but nothing the lovely EQ can't fix. The high shelf has a totally different thing going on than the high mid band, even though they can overlap and the center point of the high mids can be even higher than the high band. The low cut filter is not at all subtle. It pretty well dumps any bottom end whatsoever out of the signal and may be too severe to be useful.

Pushing the gain up on the pre results in a nicely colored overdrive. We'll see how they react to loud sources (guitar cabs, kick and snare...) but my first impression is that it's a nicer- and more controllable- grit than my other preamps, even the ART DMPA, which is a bit touchy re: finding a "sweet spot" for loud guitars before the pre fuzzes up in an unappealing way.

Now to lug them down to The Snaxodrome, blast loudthings through them and see if I can't get some fat fuggin' tracks. Even a plain old 57 sounded heftier through them.

I await sperimentz.

Pics or it's a Eurorack

Intarwebs seem to be broken right now save for my laptop- which I'm shocked functions at this point, all intarwebs aside. Anyhoo, I'm fairly certain I am the only person with a silverburst Teleblaster and a bigass bocks o' channel strips (gotta love the splatter painting on said bocks ) so here's a couple shitty webcam shots in between my swearing at the router I can't get at ATM: