Gear Of The Year 2024

Paul White Hello and welcome to this Sound on Sound podcast. I'm Paul White and with me is Hugh Robjohns. Hugh Robjohns Hello there. PW We're talking about Gear Of The Year, but in our case it's only gear that we've reviewed. The other section editors have come up with different choices and you can read all about those in the magazine. But for now, it's us talking about toys we've played with. Hugh, what's taken your fancy? I guess it's gonna be something expensive. HR Oh, you know me so well. It's quite embarrassing, isn't it? My first recommendation, my first choice for Gear Of The Year is the new Lynx. Well, I call it the Lynx Hilo because that's how it's written, but they like it to be called the Lynx Hilo 2. You may remember the original Hilo came out in 2012 I think it was, it was quite a long time ago now. It's a very straightforward two in - six out converter. It's in an unusual format 'cause it's a kind of square boxy thing with a touchscreen display on the front and it has a number of digital inputs. It's got AAS, it's got ADADT and various other bits and pieces. But back in 2012 it kind of set the standard, the benchmark for digital conversion quality. It really was very, very good, leagues ahead of almost everything else and amazingly it stayed that way right up until, well, pretty much now, to be honest. But the engineers at Lynx have now revised it. They've done some practical changes, they've improved the touchscreen cause the touchscreen was always a little bit dodgy, you have to be really precise where you put your fingers. They've improved that a lot because that capacitive touch technology has improved a lot. So they've put in a much better touchscreen, they've done a few other tweaks to the software and of course it's evolved over time to have more functions added as we've gone along anyway, but crucially they've revised the digital analogue and analogue to digital converter boards inside it and yet again, they have now set new benchmark standards on my own audio precision tests. They're right up there. I think it's the top one on the D to A side and second from top on the A to D. I mean, it's absolutely phenomenal piece of kit. Expensive obviously, cause they only send me the expensive stuff, but superb quality. It really is a real classic piece of studio equipment. If you're running a mastering studio or a transfer room or you're a hi-fi nut who wants the best that there is, can't beat the Hilo 2. So there you go, it's a great thing. It has, on the back panel there are cards you can install to connect it to a computer and you've got three choices there. You can either go USB or you can go Thunderbolt if you're running a Mac, or you can use Dante. So that's pretty impressive as well as a way of connecting it to your system. Anyway, enough of ludicrously expensive stuff. What about cheap Yorkshire stuff? You must have come up with something really cost effective? PW Well, I don't know about cheap, but on the inexpensive and good value and performs well side, Blackstar have come up with a couple of audio interfaces, the Polar 2 and the Polar 4, two input and four input. The interesting thing about these is that they're geared up to guitar players, so the guitar input can be switched to have a kind of variable un-overloadable saturation if you want it and that prevents clipping and adds a bit of warmth and dirt if you want it to. And on the mic side, you can either have it fully transparent or vintage preamp flavoured. That's a good enough feature on its own, but they also throw in quite a lot of software, including their own St. James amplifier plug-in suite and the St. James amplifiers actually do sound really rather good. I reviewed the full package a couple of years back and was impressed. HR Well, my next option for the Gear Of The Year again, I'm sorry to say, it's slightly expensive, but it's also again, one of the best products I've seen in a long, long, long, long time and that's the AEA TRP 3. Now TRP is, the ribbon preamp is what it originally stood for and three obviously means this is the third incarnation of it. And again this dates back quite a few years, but it was designed from the ground up as a very low noise, very high gain preamplifier specifically for ribbon microphones, which as we know tend to be quite insensitive, especially the vintage models that AEA used to specialize in or still do specialize in. So the original TRP preamp, I was so impressed I bought the review model, because it's just a phenomenal thing. It's incredibly clean, it's incredibly quiet, it's very neutral and transparent and it's just, it is the apocryphal wire with gain. It's a stunning thing. There were some issues, practical issues with it. The power supply is external and the connector I wasn't, it's a DIN connector and I wasn't that impressed with and there are a couple of issues with the way the metering worked. But over the years they've improved it the TRP 2 improved number of issues, the new version The TRP 3 has really kind of nailed everything, it's ticked all the boxes now, it's about as perfect as you could expect it to be. Again not cheap I'm afraid, but if you really want the best of the best preamps incredibly quiet, incredibly high gain, it goes up to something like 85db of gain, which is just phenomenal. It'll run capacitor microphones as well as ribbons, so if you want to run something with phantom power, it can do that and there's also a rack-mounting version if you prefer the rackmount rather than the desktop design, there's a rackmount version that incorporates a load of EQ as well, which is quite handy to have available. It's the same preamp circuit, has all the same performance, incredible headroom, enormous bandwidth, all the things you look for in a preamp, but very nice, well worth looking at. TRP 3. PW That must be good, especially if you bought one. HR Well yeah, quite. PW I suppose I should mention Logic Pro 11 of course, because that came out within the last year. It doesn't cost any more, it's a free upgrade if you're a Logic 10 user. For a start, it's got new automatic session players. It used to have just the drummer, but now it's also got a bass player and a keyboard player. They work from a chord track, which you have to populate yourself with the chord changes. Then you can vary the styles and the intensity and how busy it is, pretty much as you did with the drummer. So that's quite impressive as a songwriting aid. I mean, I still think it's a bit like cheating because I like doing my own parts, but if you're just trying to sketch something out, it's surprisingly good. The other thing they've put in which is more useful to me is the stem separation. It only separates into four parts and it only works on Apple Silicon machines. It'll do vocals, drums, bass and whatever's left, but it's perfectly good enough for remixing and tweaking your old demos. I dug up some stuff we recorded 40 years ago, which had then been transferred to cassette because the original tapes had been lost. Managed to pull them apart, denoise them, pitch correct vocals, add a bit of extra vocal effect and put them back together and it worked really, really well. HR That sort of separation technology really has come on a lot in the last few years, hasn't it? PW It has, I think it's magic, there must be elves inside or something. HR There must be, yeah, but to be including it now in DAWs as a standard process, that's just phenomenal. PW It is and I expect we'll see more of that in the future with probably separating into more parts, taking out the guitar part and whatever else. I mean, I know that some of the paid dedicated ones can already do that, but I wouldn't be surprised to see more of this stuff creeping into DAWs as a standard feature. HR It's artificial intelligence taking over. Here's another one from me and again it's expensive, I'm sorry. My third choice for Gear Of The Year for this year that I've reviewed is the RME UFX 3. It's a lot of third items, third iteration products coming around my way at the moment. RME needs no introduction, everybody knows about RME, fantastic interfaces with phenomenal support that goes on for multiple operating system upgrades and it's very good quality stuff, as we all know, it's widely used by professionals all over the place. The UFX was RME's flagship interface really and it's done, in itself it's gone through a few iterations and variations. The UFX 3 Is rather confusingly an updated version of the UFX Plus, if you follow these things. But it is still the flagship product and it is capable if you connect everything up of something mad like 94 inputs and 94 outputs all at the same time, which is phenomenal. Now to get that many inputs and outputs into your computer and out of your computer, you have to use USB3 as the interface. You could have used Thunderbolt I suppose, but RME chose to use USB3 and that works really well. But interestingly, if your computer doesn't support USB3, or if you've got a dodgy USB3 cable which can happen and it won't work at that speed reliably, you can tell it to run at USB2 instead and what you lose then are the MADI connections, so it still runs as a 30 input and 30 output interface, you just can't use the MADI connections, which I think is a useful fallback. I mean, I've been on location recordings where things haven't quite gone to plan and the ability for an interface to downgrade itself, to still do something useful, but in a slightly simpler way, I think it's a really nice feature, very well thought out feature. PW Were you tempted to buy it? HR Not that, no, because I don't need that many inputs and outputs in my studio and I already have an RME interface of, two of them actually, in my computer. I have the AIO cards inside the computer, the original and the new one, which work brilliantly. But the UFX 3, it's, it's a phenomenal thing. Again, everything's been updated, it's got updated converters, so the performance is really top notch, not far below the Lynx Hilo actually and the mic preamps are great, they sound clean and transparent, everything works, there's massive headroom, it's just a phenomenal interface. If you're looking for that kind of thing, with that many inputs and outputs, we can't really go wrong with RME in my view. What's on your list then, because we must be up to your third choice by now. PW Yes, this isn't a really cheap thing, but at the same time it's not expensive. It's a piece of software, it's called Vocoflex by DreamTonics and it is a formant tweaking tool. Have you played with any formant tweaking tools? HR I have played with them, yeah. PW What sort of success have you had? HR Not huge. It's not something that I really quite understand the value of, I think, probably in the kind of things I do anyway. PW Yeah well, I've tried them before and quite often they come up with all kinds of very strange artifacts, they don't sound at all natural, but this one can sound very, very natural indeed. It has a mode where you can just put a voice in and then pick some stock characters and change the voice. But it's also got this feature where you can import small snippets of vocal from other sources and kind of lean towards their formant structure and you can even import multiple voices and then move a cursor around this GUI towards the different ones and alter the influence of the different voices. Sounds quite natural. It never makes one person sound exactly like the other person because there's more to your voice than your formant structure, of course. So you're not going to put Bob Dylan in there and come out sounding like Kate Bush, that's not going to happen, but it really can create some quite unusual sounds. In fact, unbeknown to Hugh, I actually did an experiment putting his voice in and my formant structure and it came out like a totally different person that neither of us would recognise, but it still sounded real. HR The bastard love child of White and RobJohns. Oh my word! PW Okay, back to you and I'm sure it's something with a price tag that I couldn't afford. HR Well, I was only allowed to make three choices for this year, so those were my three that have actually appeared in the magazine. I did have an extended list of worthy mentions and the most expensive, since you are picking on my most expensive choices, the most expensive by quite a long way is the Hum Audio LAAL and LAAL stands for something weird. It's a delay line limiter basically and it's an analogue one. Doing delay lines in the digital domain is trivially simple and so there's a lot of plug-ins that operate as delay line limiters and the advantage of the delay line limiter, if you've not come across the term before, is that you can delay the audio path that's being played through the limiter while letting the side chain look at the audio immediately. PW Yeah, so it's a look-ahead limiter. HR It's a look-ahead limiter. So the idea is that by looking ahead of the audio, the limiter gets to dip the audio before it actually arrives, so you don't clip the initial transient like a standard limiter would, or if not clip, you know, change its shape, so it becomes a very transparent, very clean and very accurate limiter and they have been used well, since the sixties, the BBC designed an analogue delay line limiter for use in broadcasting, where it's quite important that you don't overload the transmitters. Phenomenally expensive thing and the audio delay in that was created by a whole load of inductors, quite a sizable PCB just covered in about 30 inductors and capacitors that all chain together to create phase shifts that create this audio delay. And it's a very short delay, we're talking about microseconds in those kinds of situations. The HUM LAAL thing does it in a very similar way, but using more sophisticated technology because times have moved on and it's a phenomenal thing if you need very, very clean and precise limiting as you might in mastering, it's the tool for the job, it just does it wonderfully well and of course it is entirely analogue. So for those people who eschew digital processing it's probably the only thing you can buy that does it these days. PW But the rest of us will use a plug-in. HR The rest of us will use a plug-in that will cost pennies, yeah. PW Talking of costing pennies, a couple of other honourable mentions here. One is the FireSonic FireSpacer plug-in. Now, I was at a NAMM show pre-Covid and I was going around the plug-in manufacturers saying, what the world needs is a ducker that only ducks the offending frequencies rather than ducking everything and various people said yes, that sounds like an interesting idea, but nothing ever came of it. And then FiresSonic turn up with FireSpacer, which is indeed a spectral ducker. So it looks at the spectrum of a side chain and only ducks that frequency range and it makes it much more transparent. So you can have your vocals poking out of the mix without any obvious pumping of gains in everything else. So that's very affordable and actually useful. HR Yeah, I can see these for that, that's a nice idea. I've done something similar by modifying the response of the EQ sidechain, of the compressor side chain with EQ, but yeah, to have it all built in nicely, that's a good idea. PW Yeah, because the clever part of course with this, is it's completely dynamic, so if the spectrum of the voice changes then the spectrum of what's been ducked out changes as well. HR Yeah that's, so it actually evolves as the track evolves. Whereas with my idea, you've got to keep tweaking it. Yeah, that's nice, I like that. Another honorable mention from me and this is not that expensive and it's quite old school, Crookwood, which is a quaint little English audio manufacturer. PW They did the paint pot thing, didn't they? HR They did the paint pot mic preamp, yeah. The guy who does that work, he has a phenomenal history in electronic design and he's come up with some really nice things. I use a Crookwood mastering console in my studio, for example and we've reviewed a lot of his stuff in the magazine over the years. One of the things he's done and has been doing for a long, long time, but has never got much coverage really, because it seems so basic, is a VU meter. And this is a big studio VU meter that uses Sifam meters, the, you know, the nice big chunky ones that are properly calibrated as VU meters and he's added an input buffer and a gain control on it, or an attenuator actually. So you can, basically you can alter where zero VU is in relation to program levels. So if you want to master really hot, you can attenuate the signal going into the meter and then it still waggles in the right part of the range to be really informative. The problem with most VU meters is they're calibrated by the manufacturer and you can't change it, so if you then start running hot, you just pin the needles to the end stop and if you're running much lower, they barely get off the backstop, which doesn't give you any information and people, and the BBC used to say this, people call them virtually, you know, VU stands for virtually useless meters and if you, if they're miscalibrated, they are completely useless. But if you calibrate them properly to the operating level that you're working at, they're really, really useful. Nobody needs to be told if you're in the right level if a VU meter is properly calibrated, because it's obvious that the needle is at the right part of the scale, it's a very intuitive thing. So anyway, Crookwood have built this VU meter. They do it in a number of styles. There's a multi-channel version, there's a stereo version. They use nice big meters, beautifully backlit, lovely scales, very accurate. Well worth a look if you like that and they look fantastic in a studio, they really do. Waggly needles in a studio always look good. Nearly as good as tape recorders with wheels going round, but you know. So that's another one from me as an honourable mention. What about you, any more mentions? PW Yeah, I've got a couple of honourable mentions. One is the Nektar Panorama CS12, which is a hardware control surface, currently only for Logic Pro but I think it may be updated to work with other things in the future. So it goes beyond the usual single moving fader thing with the obvious buttons for transport and mute and solo and whatever else. It gives you a little area covered in knobs, which automatically map to whatever plug-in is selected at the time and the names of all the plug-in parameters come up in the display. For those people who like adjusting plug-ins with knobs rather than mousing around, it works really, really well and it looks very pretty and it's not hugely expensive. And another thing that's worth the mention is IK Multimedia Tonex One. We're probably already familiar with their Tonex software and their larger hardware modules into which you can put your captured amplifiers. Tonex One is one of these mini format pedals, it holds just a single amplifier, which you can either clone from your own amplifier, or you can import one of the samples that they've already got. And the clever part is that you can still adjust the drive, the EQ, the compression and the reverb. So it makes a good alternative for an amplifier in the studio and it's great as a backup for gigs in case your usual amp fails, because you just plug it straight into the PA and carry on. The other one I'd like to mention is Sound Particles inDelay, which uses their 3D surround processing in a delay plug-in, so that all the different delays can be panned to different positions, or they can even be wandering about. It supports all the surround formats, from mono, which obviously isn't very surroundy all the way up to Dolby Atmos and pretty much everything in between and if you're working in stereo but want a bit of surroundness in your delays, it's got the binaural feature as well, so that's worth playing with, it's quite an impressive thing. HR Sound Particles have been doing some really impressive stuff, really pushing the boundaries of what can be done actually. PW They are very, very clever. HR Yeah. PW Yes, it's just a pity that binaural audio doesn't translate universally to everyone because we've all got different ears, you know, it'd be marvelous if it did. HR Yeah true, but you know, if you're looking for an effect it's very good. PW Yeah, certainly gives you effective things being wider and moving the movement. HR Yeah. Well, my last honorable mention goes to a company called Sonnect. I reviewed a little tester from them last year, the year before, which was very, very clever. The latest product they've come up with is a thing they call the SoundWire, which kind of is what it says. It is essentially a two channel D to A converter, USB at one end analogue coming out the other and it was designed for, essentially for live sound PA applications where somebody turns up at a conference with a laptop and you want to get good sound quality out of it and this is a very practical, convenient solution for that. You literally just plug the USB into the computer, the end of the cable is USB C, but there's a USB A adapter, which is very secure once it's plugged on the end and then you've got proper balanced audio, transformer balanced audio coming out of the two XLRs, which are about, you know, six feet long cables so enough to get down to the floor into a stage box and you plug it into your computer. It's incredibly simple, it's very neat, it comes in a little pouch to keep it tidy and coiled up and safe, all the bits are in there, you know, the adapter and everything and it's just, it's a really simple little product, but it just works superbly well. The converter, it's not RME or Lynx high low quality converter, but it's more than good enough for live sound. Actually, it's more than good enough for recording to be perfectly honest and it's just a very nice little practical solution that just, it's very good. The only slight, it's not really fair to call it an issue because it wasn't designed for this purpose, the only slight downside is that the latency through the interface is a little bit long. So if you were, for instance, to plug it into a laptop and try and play a live keyboard through the laptop, you'll notice that the latency is getting in the way of your playing, which is what I found. There's a way around that, rather than use the stock driver that it comes with, if you use ASIO4ALL as a driver, that's much, much faster and makes it quite workable and Sonnect are actually working to develop a new driver, a brand new driver that will reduce the latency to something much more sensible, which is obviously quite possible because other companies can do it, they just didn't approach it in that way, they used a stock driver from the chip manufacturer when they released it. But it's a really useful little thing and if you're doing that kind of live sound work and you want to be able to, you know, hook in pads, iPads or tablets or computers or whatever, it's a nice solution, works well. PW So I guess if you were going to look at a cheap product and actually like it, it would probably be a version three of DeoxIT if there was such a thing. HR Yeah, that would be nice, although there's nothing wrong with the actual DeoxIT that we all use is there, really. PW Nothing at all, which is why we can't mention it as product of the year. If they did a different coloured tin, maybe. HR It does get used a lot though, doesn't it? PW It does. HR Perhaps we ought to do things on the basis of how often they get used? PW Yes. Jack plugs would win every year. HR They probably would, yes. PW Well, we could rabbit on for ages and probably would, but time's running out, so it's goodbye from me and it's goodbye from Hugh. HR Goodbye, thanks for listening to our ramblings. Sam Inglis Thank-you for listening, and be sure to check out the show notes page for this episode, where you'll find further information, along with web links and details of all the other episodes. Oh, and just before you go, let me point you to the soundonsound.com/podcasts website page, where you can explore what's playing on our other channels.