The 710 Twin-Finity & UAD deals are back!
710 Twin-Finity News: Looking for a new mic pre-amp? For a limited period, get a Universal Audio 710 Twin-Finity solid state / tube mic pre-amp and a UAD2 Solo DSP card for the price of a 710 Twin-Finity! Offer available in-store, online or via telephone mail-order. Online customers: select the 710 Twin-Finity and UAD2 Solo Bundle.
Universal Audio Studio Bundles
Save even more with the Universal Audio Studio Bundle which includes the 710 mic-pre, UAD2 Solo DSP, the sE Electronics Titan multi-pattern, Class A FET, 48V phantom powered condenser microphone, and a Project Reflexion Filter for only £839 inc.vat.
Why Should I Buy A Universal Audio Bundle?
If you’re a recording musician then there are two absolutely essential pieces of kit that you need for your studio – a high quality preamp, and a world class selection of plug-ins for your DAW.
The award-winning 710 Twin-Finity is a radically new UA mic preamp design that combines both the classic retro warmth of tubes with the transient bite of solid-state, all in a 2U, half-rack unit. The 710 was created specifically to add the tonal versatility and sonic inspiration missing from generic audio interface preamps. Tone blending is continually variable between 100% tube and 100% solid-state, offering a practically infinite range of unique preamp tones, plus the ability to easily dial-in your own signature sound. There are lots of sensibly priced solid-state and tube preamplifiers out there, but the 710 is the only one that offers the best of both worlds — as well as everything in-between — all in one box, and within reach of any serious project studio’s budget. Paul White, Sound On Sound, April 2009 comments:
“Because tubes take a while to reach their optimum operating temperature, it’s a good idea to switch on a unit like this one half an hour or so before you intend to use it. Tested on speech with range of studio mics, the solid-state side of the Twin-finity sounds pretty flat and transparent, as long as you keep the drive-meter reading below midway. As you increase the drive above this, the vocal tonality becomes increasingly ‘forward’ sounding and eventually becomes quite gritty, although having the ability to push things this far is within the design brief of the device, as you may need heavier amounts of distortion when processing some instruments.
Turning the blending control fully clockwise to fully utilise the tube section, still with the drive registering at around half scale on the meter, the tone changes in a subtle way to give a more obvious tube-like character, where the high end seems smoother and the lower mid-range a hint fatter. This is exactly the character I’ve heard from a number of good-quality tube mics and tube preamps, so the lack of an output transformer clearly hasn’t been too detrimental to the creation of a true tube sound. Driving the tube harder creates the familiar ‘soft and fluffy’ distortion of an overdriven class-A tube, which provides a useful counterpoint to the more overt grittiness of the solid-state part of the circuit when pushed.
Blending the two sounds provides the opportunity to mix the fatness of the tube with the more pushy high end of the solid-state circuitry at moderate drive levels, and there are some nice hybrid tones to be had. However, I did sometimes find myself wishing that there had been two drive controls, so that I could mix a more driven tube sound with a lightly driven solid-state sound, or vice-versa. As it is, the gain control knob increases the drive to both stages, so you have to arrive at a compromise setting where both the solid-state and tube paths sound close to what you want to hear before you start blending them.
After further experimentation I came to the conclusion that both signal paths sounded best on vocals with only moderate amounts of drive, usually less than half scale on the meter when switched to Drive, and I was also surprised at how warm the 100 percent solid-state setting could be when used clean. The tube side of the preamp works nicely when you have a vocalist who might benefit from a tube mic to smooth off the high end, but as there are many singers who fall somewhere in the middle, it makes perfect sense that you can blend the two characters.
On electric guitar, I could discern very little difference between the solid-state and tube options at lower drive levels, but the differences become very obvious as the drive level is increased. Eventually the tube path breaks up almost like a guitar amp, but without the smoothing effect of the speaker, while the solid-state path gets brighter and more edgy — but doesn’t move so quickly into really obvious distortion until you apply quite a lot of drive. Once it does, it exhibits the expected grit of a solid-state circuit pushed into clipping. The more overdriven settings can work really well on some drum sounds and there’s enough angst in the tube path to add some real overdrive to a plug-in organ or keyboard sound, but for vocals I much prefer less obvious levels of drive. Still, there are death-metal singers out there who I’m sure would relish the higher settings.”
The UAD-2 SOLO DSP card gives producers and engineers a simple, powerful entry point into the award-winning UAD Powered Plug-Ins platform on Mac or PC. This single-processor PCIe card provides access to the world’s most authentic analog hardware emulations and audio processing plug-ins — including licensed emulations from Neve, Roland, BOSS, Empirical Labs, EMT, Fairchild, Harrison, Helios, Little Labs, Pultec, SPL, Teletronix and more.
710 Twin-Finity and UAD2 Solo Bundle
Universal Audio Studio Bundle inc. 710 Twin Finity, UAD2 Solo, sE Electronics Titan and Project RF