Master Channels

I was determined to tinker and improve the console by way of minor ‘modernization’ of certain components. I swapped an old 5532 opamp with a brand new opa2604 opamp in one of the two master channels and did an A/B listening test. The result was noticeable right away – the modified channel sounded ‘better’ to me initially. After listening for a while, these words came to mind: cleaner, more robust, better stability…

Admittedly, before the switch there was some dirt on the floor. The new opamps were like a consumer-grade vacuum cleaner and cleaned all of the obvious mess, but couldn’t necessarily get every little bit of dust up. In other words, the noise floor was more existent before the swap – not that the noise floor is completely absent now, though.

The audio from the console would start to break up and distort at about +6 dB (on the meters) but the new opamps make the distortion less apparent – not that I would run program at +6 dB – but it translates to better headroom. There is less stress on the amplifier and the resulting sound becomes open and takes on some life, as opposed to the ever-approaching-flat-topped-plateu-of-dynamic-range thing that was going on before.

This is good news because not only are we hearing more of the actual audio now, but when we record the two track output of the console, it prints with these ‘new and improved’ characteristics.

Pro Tools Sub Channel Returns

I decided to experiment further. The Pro Tools outputs come back to sub channels 3 and 4 on the console. I wondered what would happen if I replaced the opamp in each of these channels with a modern one…

Again I did an A/B listening test, and the results were far from subtle. I was shocked, actually. I was hearing things I literally hadn’t heard before in the songs I was so… scientifically… using for the test. It’s like I was listening with cloth over the speakers before. The high end of the frequency spectrum extended so much further! The lows were less conspicuous, but extended a little further and had a stronger constitution. The mids sounded much flatter and more uniform, especially between about 800 Hz and 2kHz, and the low mid mud was mopped up. More detailed harmonics made the instruments sound more realistic and I was hearing super minimal reverbs and delays that just weren’t there before. The transient response was astoundingly faster with the new opamp, too.

Such great improvements can be made in such small ways – all of these things from a simple component substitution! Swapping an older 5532 for a new opa2604 in 2 different places worked wonders for the Dynamix. All this was possible because of the custom power supply that we had built, of course, so… don’t try this at home *without a little bit of research*. After that, have fun!

Let’s Record.

Mitchell