Black Lion Audio Auteur On Mandolin: Large Men, Small Gear
"Friend of Gearwire" Matt Newport runs Black Lion Audio, a high-end recording equipment service shop in Chicago, IL that mods out consumer recording gear and makes a few units that have found a place in professional recording studios around the world. One of their proudest achievements is the Black Lion Audio Auteur (seen here miking an Ovation Mandolin), a microphone preamp that rivals units costing twice or even three time as much.
We also tested the Auteur on acoustic and electric guitar, as well as on vocals.
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 now we got Owen playing mandolin for us, AKG 414 is our microphone again, and in this case, like with the guitar is you're going to hear a lot of nice detail on the top end, everything's going to fill out nicely on the low end. The mandolin seems to be such a small-sounding instrument so you really should be able to recognize the amount of like a feeling of space around it as well as the articulation of the notes.
[OWEN PLAYING THE MANDOLIN THROUGH AN AKG 414 AND THE BLACK LION AUDIO AUTEUR]
Very nice.
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.
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