ROB WARMOWSKI: AES 2006. How are you doing? I'm here with Michael Grace, lead designer and president of Grace Designs, and here at AES they're rolling out the 801, m801 mic preamp, an eight-channel mic preamp. Can you tell us a little bit about what you were trying to do with this particular set of components in this whole unit?

MICHAEL GRACE: Well, basic design concept behind this preamplifier is to create a preamp that's absolutely invisible in the signal chain, something that is very musical, something that you can rely on to get all the information from your microphones and from your source onto your workstation without any coloration whatsoever. That gives you the most opportunity later to manipulate your sound in any way you want but you can only lose resolution by, you know, applying colored technology to your recording chain upfront. So, the idea here is get everything recorded as cleanly as possible and then your options will be wide open after the fact for manipulating sounds how you might need to.

ROB WARMOWSKI: And since coloration wasn’t' a design goal here, is there a class of microphone that you would recommend for use with it?

MICHAEL GRACE: Well, we use all kinds of microphones with this preamp, and that's what's really great about it. It's that you can really choose your sound characteristics based on the instrument you're recording and the microphone that you want to select, and that part of your palette will be faithfully reproduced by the 801 no matter what kind of microphone you use. The recent addition in features to the m801 compared to its predecessor, the 801, you can see here in the ribbon switch. Basically, that applies 10 dB of extra gain to the amplifiers since most ribbons have a very low output level. It disables the phantom power so you can't accidentally turn on phantom power and blow up your vintage microphone. It bypasses the phantom power coupling capacitors so there's less circuitry in the signal path, and lastly it raises the input impedance to a high impedance level that ribbon microphones like.

ROB WARMOWSKI: Interesting, interesting. And the other controls, it's a very -- as you can see, a very clean, a very simple faceplate design with a brushed aluminum, I guess, finish.

MICHAEL GRACE: It's actually stainless steel.

ROB WARMOWSKI: Stainless steel. Terrific.

MICHAEL GRACE: We have a 20-dB attenuator, phase reverse control, and if you're not in ribbon mode you have phantom power. The gain controls are gold-plated, 24-position, Swiss-made rotary switches, Elma switches.

ROB WARMOWSKI: They're detented, right?

MICHAEL GRACE: They're detented switches that use precision metal film resistors for each gain step. We don't use potentiometers for setting the gain in a mic preamplifier. Potentiometers just have too many nonlinearities and that it's difficult to get repeatable gain settings, especially at high-gain levels on potentiometers, so all of our mic preamps use switched precision metal film resistors for the gain setting.

ROB WARMOWSKI: All right, terrific. Well, thank you so much for taking the time...

MICHAEL GRACE: Yeah. Thanks Rob.

ROB WARMOWSKI: ...to talk about the m801. Gearwire.Com.