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.

The preamp we actually named after the theory of cinema that was popular in French -- in French new wave cinema called the Auteur theory, and basically it's just -- the notion is that you are kind of trying to do something different than what everyone else in your field is trying to do, so I feel that sort of characterized what -- the way that we were trying to approach the pro audio industry.

This is a fully balanced design. That's a little bit unusual because typically in mic preamps, especially less expensive ones, the balanced microphone signal gets summed into a single signal and then, you know, whatever necessary gain occurs, and it again gets rebalanced and then sent out.

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. What we did was we took the basic idea and modified it a little bit for our purposes. I really like the way that it sounded but just on a whim, I threw a 600-Ohm transformer on the output and I was just really thrilled with the end result, so we decided to manufacture it that way.

To start out with, we got our input stages, one for each channel of course, phantom power blocking circuit so that the phantom power gets fed out through here but doesn't make it past here. These are our amplifier stages. One stage handles gain and the next stage, it's purpose really is to provide further common mode rejection and then help drive the transformer.

So, the cool thing about this transformer is that -- it's actually it's not that hard to make a good 600-Ohm transformer. It doesn't really present any design challenges like maybe a 1:10 or something. So, this is a grain oriented silicon steel, it's bifilar wound which means that they wind both sides at the same time. It has really low insertion loss, which is something that you typically worry about with any sort of transformer, and the distortion specs are pretty awesome. It's fairly close in performance to the comparable 600 that Jensen makes, and it's about -- it's a little less than a tenth of the price for us, so that's one of the ways that we kind of get away with charging so little for it. So, it's a pretty impressive design in terms of sonics because we figured out how to cut the right corners, I guess.

Then we've got, of course, phantom power on each channel, and then we have phase and we have a 10-dB pad. The pad is actually on the output because the input has so much headroom it's pretty much impossible to clip. In bench testing, when we were designing this, we pumped a 15-dB signal into it and still couldn't get it to clip. That was about the hottest that our signal generator would go, so we actually don't know where the clipping point is: another benefit of a fully balanced design.

[OWEN O'MALLEY PLAYING AN TAKAMINE ACOUSTIC GUITAR THROUGH AN AKG 414 AND THE BLACK LION AUDIO AUTEUR]

MATT NEWPORT: You know, one of the ways that we tend to approach marketing this stuff, since we don't have much of a budget, we can't really take out a full-page ad in like Mix or something like that. It is we'll kind of try to give people an idea of how this performs in relationship to other pieces of equipment. We'll often record A/B samples for people to listen to comparatively. And in this particular case, what we did is we used a couple of pieces by Chandler. We just picked mic preamps that we really liked, designs that we use ourselves, so we used a Chandler germanium Chandler TG2, which is a tube mic preamp, and then we used the Little Labs preamp and tracked some A/B samples. We had a few friends come in and helped us out, tracking the samples, and it was kind of amusing because at first, when they came in, you can tell that they really -- they weren't really expecting a whole lot because after all how on earth can you get that sort of performance out of something so inexpensive but by the end of the session they were so impressed that they purchased two of them, so we felt that it says quite a bit.