ROB WARMOWSKI: All right. We're here at AES 2006, and I'm here with Dan Kennedy from Great River. We're going to be talking about the Great River products in audio processing over the years. We started off in the '90s with the Great River preamp and moved into in EQ and then a mastering compression unit. Dan, why don't you tell us a little bit about what your thinking was with the designs and what's common with these units.

DAN KENNEDY: Back in the late '90s, I started with a microphone preamp, going for the classic '70s sort of sound, away from my previous product which was a very clear, transparent, transformer-coupled device. I wanted something with a little coloration, a little body, a little more feel as well as some adjustability so that you could control how much of that there'll be, so I went back to the old '70s circuitry which is single ended, bring it three transistors and multiple stages and switched it in various gauges so you use different kind of padding, different modes.

ROB WARMOWSKI: Kind of a British approach.

DAN KENNEDY: Pretty much British. It's similar to what's in the Calrecs, the Helios, the Neves, Tridents of that era, and these preamps became fairly popular just because of how versatile it is from. I've had people who do classical piano concertos with it to rock & roll and everything in between. The equalizer came about as an accessory I guess, really, because it was always intended to do an equalizer with a preamp so there was a patch that was built into it when it was first designed, and after looking around, I like the relative simplicity and yet complete control that was available in a 1084 Neve series. So, I took that topology, kept the basic frequency points, added a few of them, changed some of the Q points to be a little broader, a little narrower, and one in the middle versus what was originally there, threw away the old amplifiers and came up with some new discrete amplifiers that have a significantly higher dynamic range, better signal-to-noise ratio, faster performance, just overall better sound.

I rearranged the switching to be computer controlled so I can condense it onto a panel that was affordable, with reliable switches.

ROB WARMOWSKI: So, what's your control input/output? The control I/O, how do you control it?

DAN KENNEDY: Oh, it's I2C, which is an internal bus. It really isn't accessible from external. That's all just the microprocessors on the front panel and it talks to audio card through a serial data bus.

ROB WARMOWSKI: An RS-232?

DAN KENNEDY: Similar.

ROB WARMOWSKI: Yeah. Okay.

DAN KENNEDY: After being on the market a couple of years, I got enough request from mastering guys and people that were using it in the final stages of their mixing to refine it a little bit for two bus use, for stereo mixed sound, for actual mastering. So, that evolved into the MEQ, which is set up with gold-on-gold switches as opposed to pots so that the settings are absolutely repeatable and accurate. They sound better. The switches are actually better contact material so there's less distortion on the pots introduced. Frequencies have been rolled around a little bit to be more adaptable, more useful for a mastering guy. Transformers were selected to be a little cleaner, a little more transparent overall.

ROB WARMOWSKI: That's what kept them using it. You've had some mercy on them and built that one.

DAN KENNEDY: It just evolved into this. It's a little more suited for the mastering guys but they're both extremely useable.