I’ve reviewed a ton of JZ microphones, and I have yet to come across one that was not a well-built and useful tool in the recording studio. Amethyst was first released in 2006 by the Violet brand (a venture of JZ founder Juris Zarins after his time as an original team member at Blue Microphones)....

I never imagined that the bass and treble controls as seen on home and car stereos for decades would follow me into my professional life. That ubiquitous EQ circuit, designed by Peter Baxandall, was reimagined in 2010 for professional audio applications by Chris Muth [Tape Op #45] and the team at...

The DC-2 is a plug-in-controlled analog compressor that works in conjunction with the McDSP APB ("analog processing box") units (APB-8, APB-16) [Tape Op #134]. As I've noted before in APB-based reviews, the APB is a one-space rackmount box that attaches to your computer via Thunderbolt and locks...

I’ve never seen the value in spending exorbitant amounts of money on recording interfaces. I started recording in the early 2000s, so I’ve been at this long enough to remember digital in its earlier days when you really did “get what you paid for” as far as an interface was concerned. Anyone who...

I have a pair of Lauten Audio LA-220 V2s above my drum kit, and I’ve previously reviewed the Lauten Snare Mic [Tape Op #159], Tom Mic [#163], and Rim Mount [#164], so of course I was eager to check out their Kick Mic too! If you haven’t been following along, these Lauten drum mics are all condenser...

Opusonix is a new online platform designed for project management, sharing mixes, and gathering feedback. There are many of these sorts of apps and subscription services these days, all with a variety of features that go far beyond where we started with services like Dropbox or Google Drive. I have...

Mäag Audio has knocked it out of the park with the PREQ2-500, a 500 Series preamp featuring their acclaimed Air Band. I’ve had the opportunity to use two PREQ2-500s in my studio on all sorts of sources, and I have been thrilled with the dimension and flexibility they have added to my recordings.

ART’s Pro VLA [Tape Op #37] has always occupied a funny little corner of the compressor world. It isn’t boutique, it has never been especially expensive, and it is not the sort of box that sends engineers down rabbit holes over its sonic lineage. And yet, in one form or another, the Pro VLA has...

I’ve been a big fan of Soyuz equipment since a rep came down to Chase Park Transduction here in Athens, Georgia, and let us demo several of their microphones a few years ago. After the demo session, studio owner David Barbe [Tape Op #14] decided to buy their Bomblet condenser mic [#140], and the...

Gus Berry reviewed oeksound’s "sonic-fixing" Soothe2 plug-in in Tape Op #138 and noted how handy it could be for suppressing bass resonances. I’ve been using it for years since that review, but exclusively for taming upper midrange harshness and rarely digging into the lower frequencies… since I...

Tone Projects is known for their popular mastering plug-ins. With UNI-L, Tone Projects’ Rune Lund-Hermansen and mastering engineer Bob Macc have created a truly special modern single-band limiter, one that uses multiband detection. This drives an adaptive lookahead time, a crucial innovation that...