BILL HOLLAND: Welcome back to Gearwire.Com. I'm Bill Holland, and I'm talking through the MPA Gold by ART. This is a microphone and instrument preamp that can boost your signal or actually create kind of a tube saturation for it and going into whatever you're using to record, be it a Digidesign interface like the MBox or be it something simpler like the Focusrite Saffire. What I'm going to look at today are the basic features of this preamp and take a look at both recording vocals and recording instruments into it. So, let's take a closer look at the box and see what's inside.

So, looking closer at the MPA Gold from ART, I'm going to take a look at some of the basic controls. First we have the input gain control. This optimizes the input signal level. You'll see here the analog meters measure the input gain. You can switch up how much gain you have. Right now, we're at normal but I can actually switch this over to +20 dB, [BILL SWITCHES TO +20 dB] and you'll -- oh, you can hear me peaking there so I have to be quiet but I'm going to take it back down. I can actually lower my gain so now I can be loud again, see? There we go but notice there's a little more noise there. Now, I can also crank the analog output and take this down if I want [BILL TWEAKS SETTINGS]. SO, you'll see as I'm bringing back up these controls, the actual output of the microphone.

Now, the best way to mic anything really is to try to rely more on the input gain then less on the analog output and use this as more of a way to boost it on the way out. We'll look into that in a little bit.

So, to get that tube sound that we might be looking for, we want to make sure that the +20 gain switch is on, here it's on already, we want to increase the input gain, set our plate voltage to normal, in this case it is already at normal, and decrease the analog output, so here I have a much warmer sound that I'm getting with this.

Now you'll notice I have phantom power on right now because I'm using a condenser mic. One thing to note about the phantom power switch is that you want to make sure that your output is all the way down before turning it on and off. Now you can hear me that I've turned it up louder so I'm going to hit phantom power again [BILL HITS PHANTOM POWER SWITCH]. Oh, there we go. Notice that delay coming back on, so you want to make sure that it's turned down. See, if you have this hooked up to your monitors or speakers, what's going to happen is you could risk popping or blowing your speakers, so you want to be really careful with that.

Now, talking about the input gain again, we also have an instrument in. This is also controlled by this, and it actually makes the rear jacks not work when you plug it in, so if you have a mic plugged in the back say, this is going to take precedent over that and these controls will also control that. One thing I want to say about the analog output really quickly is that this controls the output coming out of the reader, so it actually controls the gain after all the sound has been processed in the preamp.

So here we have the HPF control. This stands for single-tuned high pass filter. It's frequency tuneable, and it can be filtered to remove pops or low frequency info. It moves the roll-off frequency from 10 Hz all the way up to 200, and it allows you to preserve low frequency content.

The gain switch simulates a driving tube, and it makes the tube the dominant source of gain and overload character versus it just being the input gain and the analog output. You'll notice we also have the input impedance which can adjust how the gain reacts. You'll hear a lot more noise coming as I raise this up, and now if I bring that down and raise my analog output.

We also have the phase switch, which can be set to normal as it is right now, or reverse -- this is reverse phase -- and all this does is invert the phase of the audio. The reasons for using this would be wiring errors in a piece of hardware that is being inputted into the MPA Gold, inversions in audio equipment, and if two mics are out of phase, one mic canceled various frequencies in the others, so you want to make sure to reverse this so that they don't cancel each other out.

Next, we have the plate voltage switch, which can be set to normal or high. In this case, it's set to normal for the moment. What this does is it sets the tube bias point and the plate voltage level for the differential tube circuit. It's headroom is adjusted with the gain switch and input gain control, and it takes about 10 to 30 seconds to transition between the two modes. Let me give you the difference here. Right now we're normal, and now we're going to high, and the transition should be complete. You should b e able to hear a little bit of a difference, probably if I bring the -- adjust the inputs and analog output you'll hear a little bit of a difference.

Now, for audio recording, you want to make sure that you saturate the audio using the input gain before the analog out. The reason for this is the analog output adds on to whatever is coming in so you want your input to be the strongest it possibly can be. You can also switch up the various gain switches to determine what you want your sound to come out like in the end. Remember, this is used for shaping and manipulating your sound, just like any other audio device, and it's going to determine what the end product is going to sound like going into your computer.

Now really quickly, let's grab a guitar and take a look at the instrument input. As you'll hear, the instrument input has a different sound has a different sound than the feed coming from the mic, but of course this should be obvious it's a different type of a signal being sent. This can be recorded anyway coming out of the device. It is fed out through an XLR cable, just like the mic signal is except it's being fed out as a line [INDISCERNIBLE], so you can use that to record your instruments, guitars, bass, or whatever you need.

So again, the MPA Gold from ART is a pretty neat piece of gear. It's an affordable pro solution for anyone who wants to have a hardware preamp outside of their interface or their sound card. It seems to be pretty reliable from what I've tested on it, and the construction looks very durable. I personally have not really had enough time to record with this unit so I don't know how it holds up over time, but I do know that it sounds very warm, it has a very strong signal, and is pretty much guaranteed to do what you need it to do when you're looking for a hardware solution that's going to give more than your interface or any type of gain boosting you may be doing on a mixer or a cheap sound card.

Again, I'm Bill Holland for Gearwire.Com. This has been the MPA Gold from ART.