JONATHAN LITTLE: I’m going to go through the LMNO Pre for you, our newest product. It’s finally getting around there. Some of the cool things about it are we’ll start from the very beginning. You have a microphone input on the front and the back which you can go between, which is great when you need to plug in the front. If you have it mounted in a rack, you don’t have to reach behind something. It is also good that you can A/B between two mics on the same signal and you can go between them. Nice feature.

Then we have the DI input which are not your typical DI inputs on a mic pre. They actually have their own dedicated transformer before the discrete solid state section of the unit. So, it’s not like you’re going through the transformer and then the mic pre transformer as you would with a normal passive DI but you’re actually coming out of the DI transformer directly into the active circuitry of the pre.

It has two inputs. One is a buffered input with a 10-megaohm input impedance before the DI transformer and one comes directly to the primary of the transformer so this would be used for passive pickups and this would be used for active pickups. However, if you find yourself always using the input for active pickups for example, you can set the other input to be a through to go out to an amp if you’d like something like that. Also, as far as the input transformer, the mic input transformer is a custom wound Little Labs transformer that we chose after a lot of testing of what the commercially available transformers out there were. I made it so it’s very easy though to use, a different input transformer if you want on the front of the unit because there’s a five-pin XLR on the rear of the unit that will allow you to plug in, let’s say you have an old Neve transformer, you can plug that into the rear of the unit and use that instead of our built in transformer, and there’s a small switch on the back that you can switch that transformer in or our.

The circuit topology on the unit is completely differential from input to output. That means there’s the same electronics that are on the positive signal or on the negative signal, so it push-pulls throughout the whole unit. We have two level controls for gain, two gain controls I should say. We have low gain and we have high gain. Now, the reason why we have two separate ones was a matter of what we could buy for parts for the unit because in order to do a completely differential circuit, you have to have a separate potentiometer for the positive signal as well as the negative signal, and in order to make it work over a very large gain stage -- gain range I should say -- you really should use two separate potentiometers of different values. One is a high-value potentiometer and one is a low-value potentiometer. I may be getting a little technical for you on that, but I couldn’t get a four-gain potentiometer to do it hence the two separate potentiometers, separate gain controls.

Anyway, going further down the line, we have what’s called low-frequency resonance adjust, which is something that can be used for when someone wants a proximity effect but they don’t want their singer slobbering on the microphone. It allows you to stay further back from the microphone and still get that proximity effect, and you can actually tune it to the resonant frequency of the chest of the singer. I like it because you can turn a very thin sounding singer into a very full sounding singer. I also say you can turn Barry Gibb into Barry White or you can turn a mouse into a moose. [LAUGHING] Okay.

Then if you’re familiar with some of the other Little Lab products, we have something called the IBP, which stands for “in between phase”, and that allows you to sweep phase between 0 and 180 degrees. That’s built into the preamp, right here, the phase alignment feature, as well as the more common polarity switch which you can flip polarity between 0 and 180 degrees.

Another useful feature on the unit, it has an output level trim, which -- Oh, I should get back to the phase alignment feature. What’s also good about the phase alignment feature is that you can insert into a line level on the rear, so if you want it -- if you want to use it later on and rather than while you’re actually recording, you can and tap into the rear of the unit and use the phase alignment feature on it’s own without the mic pre.

Another feature we have is output level trim, which comes after the output transformer, so you can turn these levels up really [INDISCERNIBLE] -- you can turn the levels up and really saturate the output transformer and then turn the level down after the output transformer, a nice, useful feature. And then, as I say, it’s a discrete circuit path completely push-pull from input to output. And I think that’s it.