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Post by Vincent R. on Nov 25, 2022 10:47:26 GMT -6
I demoed an UA LA2A reissue for weekend and I was surprisingly underwhelmed with it, I thought it sounded quite vanilla. I’m hoping the AS Opto has more of the vintage vibe of the 68 original design - I guess one needs the vintage iron? What I’ll say about the Opto is it’s surprisingly clean sounding and deceptively vibey. Running signal through it doesn’t really change the sound too much. There’s a low end boost and a high end shimmer that gets added. Once you start dialing in the compression the vibe can get really pronounced. The low frequency knob is wonderfully useful. |
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Post by earlevel on Nov 25, 2022 16:35:30 GMT -6
You be a me to it, Eric! Build quality, and quality control are extremely important. Fashionable or not, upgrading easy components like the T4 cells to premium (in and of itself) won't evaluate the cheaper knockoff clone to the boutique standards. Yeah I don’t think most end users have an understanding of “ estimated duty cycles” . Every switch or pot has this spec it’s an estimate of how many times you can use it before it will give up the ghost. I get that what some of these cheaper gear vendors use will be fine for some guys at home, but you put the KT label on something and the expectation is touring quality. For years KT was the standard for touring drive rack electronics. The thing with this modern SMD KT clone line is that your not going to be able to simply drop in a decent replacement pot, the cheap pots are designed for Behringer. I expect that you're right. Still, it's a good fit for people like me, who would never, ever buy an 1176, LA-2A, and EQP-1A, nor even $1k clones of them just to see what they bring, especially in contrast with similar plugins. The idea being that if I "get it", but want to do better, I can always take the next step and replace one of them with something better, and see if I hear the value there. Especially since I didn't really have a problem to solve—just wanted to experiment with the old school way of doing things, price tag $299 + $299 + $249. (This is for my vocal mic chain, exclusively, I don't mic anything else.) So far, living with the 76-KT and EQP-KT for more than a year, the 76' was immediately useful. I don't need a compressor on the vocal mic, I'd been without one for years and exercise good mic technique, so I'm just seeing what it adds, and even that may largely be for a better monitoring experience, which might lead to a more confident performance. But I think the 76' would be worth getting one or two more if I were mic'ing drums here, I think it would be a useful piece in general. What impressed me right off was the transparency—even getting quite ham-fisted about settings, the vocals held up. Since I son't have much use for an outboard EQ, the EQP' was just something to try. It's is pretty compelling on the low frequency adjustments (running a sampled kick through it or something), and I realize its peaking filter is not the same as the original. But again, not much need for EQ, so I mainly got it as am inline tube element. Not sure it's worth using, I could take it or leave it. With the 2A', I'll be interested to see if I like it better than the 76' style for vocals, or in combination with the 76'. If I love what it brings, that may be the piece that I choose to upgrade to a more pricey 2A clone at some point. Of course, any pro or highly utilized studio would target something higher end, even if for reliability alone. But I'm not going to kill this stuff with cycles, it's just me here. So far, the two pieces have been great. If the 76' went tits-up this afternoon, I wouldn't feel bad about it, the $299 and a year have proved the 1176-style worth to me—I'd consider getting a more robust clone and not regret the $299. |
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