We don’t typically do gear reviews on Tonebenders. There are a number of excellent youtube channels out there that really excel at that kind of thing, and most of what any of us would put out there would end up pretty redundant.
That said, there is a ton of audio value out there right now, and with everyone continuing to move to home studios I figured that I would at least keep my personal gear setup pretty public so that the things that I’ve learned can be shared with the community at large.
My previous setup had my original mixpre3 as my computer interface. This worked ok because the preamp is amazing and the box can record to the internal SD card while feeding audio to protools, but the form factor wasn’t really ideal since I was using the headphone amp to drive my speakers – which meant I didn’t have enough headroom for loud stuff and I couldn’t calibrate my listening environment. Also, the headphone knob is a little fiddly and is side-mounted so it wasn’t great for dialing around in various situations.
This led to my most recent purchase is the SSL 2 – a 2 channel interface from Solid State logic – who’s claim to fame is the famous SSL preamp and the 4k color circuit. I was interested in that as well as the giant control room knob and a more powerful headphone amp.
The price point on this thing is pretty amazing. About $250 USD right now, and I think I’d pay twice that and still consider it a value given how these preamps sound. Also, the 4k was pretty magical on every mic I put it on.
I have a good selection of mics that I can use as my main voice mic on the podcast right now, so I figured this would be a good opportunity to both put the SSL2 through its paces and also also try to establish which of these mics is best suited to be my daily driver in the current rig. I had a feeling which one I’d eventually land on, but I figured I’d go through the process to see what I like regardless.
To do the test, I grabbed some Hemmingway and read about a half page into each mic with both the 4k on and off. What I’ve posted here are level-matched 320kbs mp3s. I tested shotgun mics, dynamic mics, small diaphragm condensers and large diaphragm condensers from a wide range of pricepoints. Outside of gain-matching I’ve done no other processing to these, and I feel like this bitrate mp3 still really does translate the different sounds well.
All of these tests add up to about 95mb of MP3s that load up on page 2. Jump on over and take a listen!
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