Neumann Interface!?

When? Older preamps tend to have more usable headroom than common pres today (mostly opamps and IC preamp chip based) because they were intended to amplify ribbons and not bring up noise in the old tape formulation and vinyl eras. The ones with low headroom like Helios and the v72 were always controversial as were the ones that needed pads.

The “colored gear” is not clipping. It has non-linearities like all analog circuits do. And even the hard voltage clipping, diode clippers, tube clipping, etc sound different. Analog gear only generally clips you when you clip the voltage rails of the power supply and even then will be brief, not that harsh on transients usually, just annoying, and not have foldback usually unlike digital clipping. Rms clipping the voltage rails, where they usually hard clip, sounds fucking awful on almost everything.

The clipping seem in most popular music masters is awful pcm clipping and then analog clipping from intersample peaks. Your converters can start soft clipping even at -1 dbfs on some equipment. Others will hard clip at 0dbfs.

Primitive distortion plugins tries to approximate analog through polynomial wave shapes and these can sound okay if done well like the Oxford Inflator/Warmth/Enhance or Kazrog True Iron but these are not analog non-linearities. Hear tone of Arousor’s wave shaper vs Distressor’s shunted ICs. You can’t built a pure polynomial wave shaper in analog. Run colored equipment not a deliberate shitbox (like most tube revival gear) into an analyzer and it will have mostly linear gain and won’t wave shape until you hit it really hot!

Even wave shaping functions that only produce low order, even or odd harmonics with sine tones will produce the other when fed with any asymmetrical wave forms. And intermodulation distortion. And a lot of color gear can’t be modeled with waveshapers because the distortion is not merely level and frequency dependent so any sort of dynamic convolution like Acustica, Nebula, IK, and Kit, and all the convolution reverb attempts won’t sound right and “alive” but they hope to capture the black box of gear they don’t have access to the designs of or don’t care to emulate the circuitry or function of as best they can!

No itb emulation dares to emulate thermal distortion, which is a huge issue in even modern, supposedly clean gear! Crank something multichannel with all inputs for hours and tell me it sounds the same as when just turned on. A ton of the time it doesn’t.

Then we have the compressor emulations and recreations and god are they usually wtf? They don’t have access to the original specs most of the time or they have the circuit diagrams but not the algorithms and filters. And if they do, don’t care to make them work like the hardware. Take emulations. You can get everything from a pretty smooth dynamics processor like the Glue and the DDMF Magic Death Eyes to wtf monstrosities like Waves SSL, pretty much every 1176 and dbx 160 model, the SSL Native and Waves Channel Compressor, etc.

UAD didn’t even succeed in reverse engineering the classic Sony / Sonnox Oxford plugs and people expect them to match hardware from 50 years ago and they try and don’t care if they fail because people pay hundreds for their software and thousands for hardware! I’d rather they make another thing like the sicko 4-710 pre than try to make more 1176 or modernize a 610 but that wouldn’t sell as much.

I'm not really talking about colored gear. I'm talking about the sound you hear on Motown records or Little Richard records or whatever. A lot of it is just the sound of stuff being tracked really hot and pushing the various devices (pre amps, tape, etc) in the signal chain.

Which is another way of saying running out of headroom.

Dan, you’re a 4-710 fan? Tell me about what you dig?
(I like it too, just curiousity).

I agree with you. I also run it on drums. Have it as a classic glyn johns setup on big drums tuned high. And it delivers every time. I also use it as a central point in my studio where i convert and run all my additional 4 pres thru. A great piece. 

Do I sense a Neumann vs. Neve Interface smackdown in the works?
Chris

How do you like the 710 on vocals then?
(I like the UA 610 Solo)
Thanks, Chris

Thanks! I like the "similar-ish" UA Volt "Vintage Button" sometimes.
(These seem to be a potential Gateway Drug )
Chris

It's just a rebranded Anubis but with USB as it's main connection and adat for expansion vs Raven (networked).

It will not be cheap I'm sure. And it'll sound amazing. The Anubis is great. All mergings stuff is great

The drivers will be the important part. 

Very true. That if anything is one of the nicest things about the USB interface. It should be easy to use. 

Compared to mergings stuff which isn't hard but not always the most straight forward. This is the main reason those of us that are in the pyramix world(merging Technologies DAW) it has good potential for a secondary unit to have on hand for certain tasks. 

Anubis Pro is 2199.00. MT 48 is 1850.00 so slightly less.