10 published posts
I bought a TEAC A-3340S off a guy who described it as “serviced, works great, just needs a clean.” It arrived with a seized capstan, a belt that had turned…
I finally did the thing I’d been putting off. I printed a mix to the Otari MX-5050 at 15 IPS, dumped it back in, and then spent an afternoon trying…
The bench light was on and the console was open again, a Neve-style input module flipped on its side with the output transformer still warm from the last session. I…
Another week, another tape emulation. My inbox gets a few of these a month now, and most of them are a picture of a reel-to-reel with a wow knob bolted…
I keep a pair of bus compressors patched at the bench: a real SSL-style VCA unit and whatever plugin emulation I happen to be testing that week. Last month I…
I run the same dumb test on a loose schedule. Sine sweep into a saturator, output into a scope and a spectrum analyzer, then I sit there counting harmonics like…
I get asked for monitor recommendations more than any other gear question. Strip away the marketing and it’s always the same: the room matters more than the box, and no…
The car test is not a myth and it is not a mastering problem. I have lost count of how many times I have bounced a mix that sat perfectly…
The first time I scoped a 1kHz sine through a Neve input transformer and watched the second harmonic rise as I cranked the input, something clicked. It wasn’t magic. It…
I get asked this on a fairly regular rotation: “I just bought a crusty old console. Should I recap it?” My answer is always the same. Depends on whether the…