Sound On Sound UK

Nearly 30 years after I last set foot in college, the month of October still feels exciting. Forget January: this is when the year really starts. And, as ever, October 2024 will see thousands of 18-year-olds joining the eternal struggle to get up for their nine o’clock lectures. If you’re one of them, I’d like to think you’re doing exactly the right thing by reading this magazine. And I’d also like to reassure you that you are doing the right thing in a more general sense. There was a time when I would have cautioned people to think carefully before spending three years and tens of thousands of pounds on a university course. The prevailing attitude in the industry back then could be summed up as “Bloody students. Get their hands…

As befits one of the world’s largest manufacturers, Shure have microphones for every conceivable application. Fom conference room to concert hall, sweaty club to swanky studio, harp to harmonica, you’ll undoubtedly find something in their huge range that does what you need. In many cases, in fact, Shure offer multiple microphones for the same applications, at different price levels. Most of the Shure mics that will be of interest to SOS readers have model numbers prefixed with SM, which stood originally for ‘studio microphone’. This range encompasses most of the company’s most popular workhorses, including the SM7, SM57 and SM58, and there can be few studios worldwide that don’t contain at least one SM-series mic. Until now, though, the SM series has not featured a large-diaphragm capacitor microphone of the type that’s…

Available in all the common plug-in formats, including AAX, inDelay applies the immersive technology that has impressed us on previous Sound Particles plug-ins to delay. Using the company’s own spatial processing, sounds can be given placement and movement that translates to anything from mono or stereo right up to multi-channel immersive audio. Both the input and output formats can be selected from a comprehensive range of around 30 multi-channel options, right down to basic mono, while the output also offers a number of stereo alternatives, including Blumlein and M-S, as well as binaural and Ambisonic options for headphone listening. Clearly, this is no simple delay — it can generate up to 100 delays using 16 individually customisable taps, each of which can be positioned in space. For example, if simply processing…

After many years spent repairing and racking vintage equipment, David Marquette wanted to develop his own designs using the best parts of the technology he’d worked on over the years. To that end, back in 1999, he founded California-based Mercury Recording Equipment. Mercury are celebrating their 25th anniversary this year, and have released many products over the years. From their first three designs, the Fairchild 660-inspired Mercury 66 Limiter and the EQ-H1 and EQ-P1 equalisers, to their highly regarded Mercury M72s and M76m mic preamps based on the Telefunken/Siemens V72s and V76m, all Mercury’s products are hand-built by a very small team — they’re the very definition of a high-end boutique pro audio company . While this means they don’t come cheap, it’s fair to say that they’re all much…

From the groundbreaking H910 Harmonizer to their current H90 stompbox, Eventide are best known for their digital gear. But back in the ’70s their catalogue included a number of analogue processors. Perhaps the most interesting of them was the Omnipressor, now reissued to celebrate its 50th anniversary. Like the original, the reissue Omnipressor is a smart black 2U rack unit. Unlike the original, thankfully, its audio I/O is on conventional connectors rather than screw terminals: line in, line out, side-chain in and side-chain out are on both XLRs and quarter-inch jacks, while stereo link in and out are on jacks only. On the front panel, the chunky white plastic buttons of the ’70s incarnation have been replaced by switches. This has freed up space for Eventide to add quite a few…

Lewitt say the Connect 2 is “the most user-friendly audio interface”. They also say you can get a sensational sound in a few clicks and that it will guard against distortion, has three iconic preamp sounds, will add compression and denoising like a pro and is completely intuitive to use. Sounds like my kind of thing! Let’s have a look. The out-of-the-box experience is really quite yummy. The packaging is nice, you get a nicely wound and lengthy USB-C cable with a useful USB-A adaptor, and the interface itself is rather pleasing to the touch and has a nice weight to it. It has a smooth curve and a nice angle to it and is covered in a rubberised texture with raised markings tattooed across the surface. When you connect it…