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're going to do a vocal track with Owen once again, our multi-talented musician here. Same microphone, AKG 414, really kind of the same principles apply here. You should hear a nice soft top, a lot of like velvety quality in the upper mids and a lot of nice extension in the low end.

OWEN O'MALLEY: [OWEN SINGING "TEA FOR TWO" FROM THE MUSICAL "NO, NO NANETTE." THROUGH AN AKG 414 AND THE BLACK LION AUDIO AUTEUR] "I'm discontented with homes that are rented, so I have invented my own. Darling, this place is a lover's oasis where life's weary chase is unknown. Far from the eyes of the city where flowers pretty caress the stream. Cozy to hide in, to live side by side in, don't let it abide in my dreams."

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.