MATT NEWPORT: Hi. I'm Matt Newport. I run Black Lion Audio, and we're here to talk a little bit about our new preamp, the Auteur. This is a fully balanced design.

And what we did with this was we actually copied off of a fairly famous circuit which is now as the Cohen double balanced circuit. It served as the basis for mic preamps that SSL installed in some of their consoles, that AMEK installed in certain consoles. The principle behind it is that you have dual amplifiers, one to handle each side of the balanced signal. You get more headroom, better noise reduction, better distortion, performance. It's just an all-around better circuit.

The cool thing is that it's not that actually expensive to make.

And we're about to record a little guitar through the mic preamp. We're using an ESP with EMG pickups through a Fender Bassman. What you're going to notice in sound samples is I guess it's best summed up by a guy named Jay Ruston who does quite a bit of producing in L.A. and is a big fan of the Auteur. The mid range and the top end are really creamy, so you'll notice that when you track with it that you don't have to compress quite so much to kind of get that mid range to behave, and the low end extension is really nice because of the sonic frequency response of the transformer.

[OWEN PLAYING ELECTRIC GUITAR CLEAN THROUGH A FENDER BASSMAN AND BLACK LION AUDIO AUTEUR]

So, we're going to do another guitar take. Owen's going to play some distorted guitar through an Ibanez Tube Screamer. Same amp setup, same guitar, and promise no "Smoke on the Water" or anything like that, so.

[OWEN PLAYING ELECTRIC GUITAR OVERDRIVEN THROUGH AN IBANEZ TUBE SCREAMER, FENDER BASSMAN, AND BLACK LION AUDIO AUTEUR]

Thank you. That was lovely. So yeah, there you have it, a little bit of a sound example of what the Auteur sounds like on the guitar. If you want to hear more stuff, you know, we definitely we got sound samples on our web site, BlackLionAudio.com.