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All information in these pages is copyright (c) 1989-2003 by Roger Nichols. All rights reserved. Permission for personal reference only, and may not be reproduced by any method without written permission.
by Roger Nichols
When I was growing up, "There's a rumble down the street!" meant
that there was a fight, usually between two rival car clubs. I was a member
of the Quarter Kings of Ontario California and displayed my car club plaque
in the back window of my blown, injected '57 Chevy. The rival car club at
the time was the Forty Niners of Upland California. We never had any knock
down drag out fights, but we used to drag race on back roads a lot.
Now days a rumble down the street means someone in a Honda Civic with the
back seat full of subwoofers and the trunk full of amplifiers. A drag race
probably refers to guys running in high heels and dresses. Times have changed.
Studios and studio equipment has changed, too. Dolby A noise reduction used
to take up 7 rack spaces for each pair of channels, and now you can get
24 channels of Dolby that will fit inside the tape machine. Mitsubishi 32
track digital machines used to cost $160,000 and now used ones can be found
for the same price as 32 channels of Tascam or ADAT. Many project studios
have more tracks of digital audio than lots of commercial facilities.
In the category of outboard gear, I see two things happening. On one hand,
we have more and more sophisticated outboard reverbs and signal processors
getting ever more powerful. On the other hand we have a rising lust for
old outboard gear that 10 or 15 years ago could be found in junk heaps and
electronic salvage dealers. 15 or 20 years ago, Pultec, Langevin, API, UREI,
Gotham, and similar marques branded the faceplates of outboard gear in most
of the major studios. As newer gear came out, the old gear was replaced.
It was not until the digital age that we realized what we really had in
these junk heaps.
All of the early outboard gear was made with discrete components that were
hand wired. Sometimes the components had to be hand selected to attain the
desired performance. Many pieces of outboard gear utilized tubes instead
of transistors. Tubes sounded different than transistors, and there were
fans of both. Tube gear sounded warm, gave off plenty of heat in the winter
and could always double as a boat anchor. Transistorized equipment ran much
cooler, required less maintenance and took up less rack space. The war between
tubes and ICs hasn't stopped yet.
Many pieces of vintage outboard gear added their own unique character to
the sound. With digital recordings it was now easier to preserve this character
on tape. Now it is easier to hear the difference between a $5000 tube mic
preamp and a $500 tube mic preamp. It is also easier to hear the difference
between a Pultec EQ and the "hot" EQ of the moment. When using
tube compressors the operative word to describe the way it sounds is usually
"nice".
The bottom line here is that as some people upgrade their studios to incorporate
new whiz bang outboard gear, they may be throwing the baby out with the
bath water. If they don't want the old UREI 1176 limiters or API EQ modules,
maybe you can take them off their hands for a reasonable price. This doesn't
happen all of the time, but I see it once in a while, usually when a friend
of mine calls me up to brag about the Pultec he found in a pawn shop for
$75, or the perfect U-87 for $40. Keep your eyes open. Check out out-of-the-way
pawn shops and classified ads in those little weekly papers. Your studio
full of quality used gear could be the envy of the neighborhood. If you
run across something and you don't know what it is, e-mail me or ask on
rec.audio.pro on the Internet. Somebody will know what it is. Don't tell
them where it is, though, or it might not be there when you go back to get
it.