Presonus ADL 600 Microphone preamp

Presonus and famed audio designer Anthony DeMaria have collaborated on what could be called a boutique in-box for the masses. McCristal and McCaviar, in a way; DeMaria provided the gourmet recipe, and Presonus figured out how to serve it up in the high volume that brings the cost within reach of the more serious of us small-potatoes musician/producers. We’re still in the four-figure club, of course, but at half the price of some of the other in-crowd input devices.

Lots and lots of gain is available here, up to 73dB to be precise. What does that mean? It means that weak signals like those that come from passive electromechanical keyboards like the Clavinet, Pianet, Rhodes, and Wurly can be brought up to useful levels without appreciable background noise (depending on the source, naturally). I don’t know about you, but I prefer to hear these instruments without “simulated surf” layered in the background. My Rhodes, with a cable coming straight off the output on the harp, sounded warm and fat and huge. Multi-instrumentalists take note as well: Acoustic instruments with passive piezo pickups fare very well through the ADL 600’s instrument input too. I have a built-from-parts Stratoid guitar whose only pickup is a set of passive piezo bridge saddles. With the gain available from the ADL 600, I was finally able to get a sound into Pro Tools that had enough guts to let me sculpt it effectively with EQ. My spider-bridge resonator guitar has a Pickup The World contact pickup installed, and that also benefited from the clean high gain and pristine class-A circuitry, sounding very large and authoritative. Direct-plugged electric guitars get a crystalline clarity that’s just plain unavailable from a guitar amp, with all the richness and roundness an amp can give. Synths also benefit from the slight rounding provided by the ADL 600; an Alesis Ion (already a pretty analog-sounding digital synth) received an extra little bit of analogosity when tracked through the ADL 600.

With microphones, it’s so cool to use the variable impedance to get subtle color shifts from your mics. Some mics respond to differences in load more drastically than others, but with an sE Electronics Gemini vocal mic plugged in, a number of different sounds were available, some thicker, some thinner. None sounded fundamentally different from the “normal” sound of the mic (which is really something special for the price) but they weren’t easily attainable by EQ-ing after the fact, either. Dynamic mics can be manipulated too; several colors I’d never heard from a Sennheiser 421 — pretty versatile on its own — were unlocked by the ADL 600. Everything I recorded with it in the signal chain just sounded fabulous. It’ll be a wrench to send this one back; if my current budget had room to let me purchase it, I wouldn’t hesitate. (Maybe I can justify giving myself a Christmas present.)

Reality check time: Did miked sources sound way better than when I used the Focusrite-designed preamps in my Digidesign Mbox? It wasn’t a night-and-day difference — in a single-track comparison. Where I really noticed the diff was when I had a whole mix of things that had all been recorded through the ADL 600. The added clarity and detail of each element was definitely more noticeable when all the sources were combined in a mix.

For big-studio results on a (stretched) home-studio budget, the ADL 600 is a really great option. It gives you about 90% of what’s offered by boxes costing almost twice as much. Because it provides performance beyond what’s expected at this price, it deserves a Key Buy award.

In addition to producing for local songwriters and friends’ bands, Ken Hughes has been working on his own covers record for the past few months. Predictably, he had nothing finished at the time of the last Keyboard Corner covers project CD. Maybe next year. . . .