FaderMaster Studios Podcast 003 - June 03 2010

The Creamer Preamplifier Shootout

It's been a long time coming, but we finally managed to get our act together and podcast this treat for all the audio nerds out there. It's our first ever gear shootout at the studio, and we're quite pleased with the results.

Why a preamplifier shootout? Well, we love preamps, we love Boris Drazic and we love The Creamer. The Creamer was amazing upon first listen so we had to stack it up against some of our existing beloved preamps. So, while Santana tests it out in L.A., FaderMaster Studios is testing it out in Vancouver.

The Creamer Preamplifier Shootout

It's been a long time coming, but we finally managed to get our act together and podcast this treat for all the audio nerds out there. It's our first ever gear shootout at the studio, and we're quite pleased with the results.

Why a preamplifier shootout? Well, we love preamps, we love Boris Drazic and we love The Creamer. The Creamer was amazing upon first listen so we had to stack it up against some of our existing beloved preamps. So, while Santana tests it out in L.A., FaderMaster Studios is testing it out in Vancouver.

Check out the PDF Brochure for The Creamer

Visit Sonic Farm on the web.

We tested serial #000, the very first Creamer. With labcoats on, and our precious ears lubed up, we began the tests one evening in late May 2010 at the studio. We hope you find the results useful, especially if you are in the market for a new preamp! Preamplifiers Used * Chandler Limited EMI TG-2 * Sonic Farm The Creamer Class A Pentode Preamplifier * Sytek MPX4A * Universal Audio UA-610B (From a UA-6176 unlinked from the 1176) Microphones Used * Beyerdynamic M160 * AKG D112 * Shure SM57 * Shure SM7B

Dominique Fricot was kind enough to be our guinea pig for the tests, and we thank him very much for playing the same thing over and over.

Here's the MP3 of what came out with The Creamer, a lead vocal and acoustic guitar mix that we think sounds great. The M160 is on the acoustic and an SM7B on the vocal.

We tested the various preamps as fairly as we could. We chose to do different takes as opposed to splitting the mic signal to multiple preamps. Although this is not a perfect way to test, we felt it would be better than having funky impedances happening via inputs to the preamps from MULTS in the patchbay. We also did not want to run the mics through a passive transformer-based splitter, or an active splitter to avoid any unecessary colouration. We also decided to track the acoustic guitar and vocal seperately to avoid any bleed that would skew the results. We tried out best the match gains across the preamps to further the value of the results. We know that we certainly heard some pretty dramatic differences among the preamps, and it was refreshing to hear these preamps stacked up against each other.

We do love Boris, but that's not why we are all choosing The Creamer as our favourite preamp of the bunch. It was simply the most consistent sounding across the board, not to mention the most versatile as well!

The audio is provided as 16bit/44.1k samples. There are numerous takes of the guitar, vocal and also some kick/snare for you to digest.

Category:

Science & Technology

Tags:

• mic preamp
• shootout
• audio
• studio
• test
• the creamer
• tubes
• sonic farm
• fadermaster studios

[EyesTrustYou]

10 points for Boris :)