HOOTER SOUND B1

Category:  Products / studio equipment / pre-amp

Added: 07-Jun-99  |  Author: admin

New price: 160 quid !!!!  |   S/H price: huh ???

Company Link:  No company link

HOOTER SOUND B1

The er.... Hooter Sound... B1... What a name, and in Yank-speak Hooters of course are a pair of tits, (usualy largely proportioned ones at that!).... Perhaps the name will cause this unit to gain legendary status over the pond, they certainly won't forget the name once metioned that's for sure !... So the B1, the yellow peril it looks more like, and it could prove to be as dangerous included into your sonic arsenal, as a bowlfull of shark infested custard !!....

Trouble is, you get a pc, get your soundcard, get a few synths or whatever, and you want to do nice cool vocals.... and what does the soundcard give you to accomodate your luverlee flash mic??.... right !!... In most cases a weedy underspec'd crappy mic pre-amp with some poxy mini-jack connector - g-reeeat !!....

In steps the B1... with a fine pedigree, coming from the design drawing board of the same guy who created the Joe Meek range ... and, made by the same parent company (Fletcher ElectroAcoustics).....

This units is VERY cheap, yet has an excellent pedigree... They seem to have seen a radical hole in the market, and i guess, went for volume sales to the discerning PC home musician who wants a way better mic sound, rather than setting it to the higher price they could have charged and perhaps putting off alot of home music pc users who might thing twice about shelling out say 300-400 for a mic-amp...... THIS IS A MIGHTY BARGAIN !!

So... first up a great quality mic pre.... with +20db of headroom, balanced XLR input & 48V phantom power so you'll be not restricted for choice of mic's to plug into this baby.... The gain is adjustable for any low impedance microphones too such as alot of us cheap-ass pc music users might have (!).. heh heh......There is also a line input for synths, drum-boxes, bass etc etc...

The B1 also get's you a VCA volume compressor built in too !.... and these Joe Meek guys have somewhat of a reputation for cool compressors... the compressor will help you get a smoother overall level and greater presence to the sound.... apparently it's got some nice auto touches to compensate for the lack of usual controls... like the input gain auto-increases apparently to make up for the volume drop caused when greater compression is applied.... so although this unit looks sparse with the control knobs, it does the biz and does it well... The B1 has an in/out switch for quick comparrison between comp'd and non-comp'd sound, and the compression ratio is variable from 1.2 to 1 up to 8 to 1 .

Not only do you get all that for 160 quid, but also to save the day from un-wanted digital overloads and resulting nasty digital clipping at your soundcard input, the unit also has a peak limiter at the output !.... blimey....nice touch !

Finaly to top it all off, you get a niose-gate with variable gate threshold ... don't think of this as a noise gate for doing Gate-fx such as described in the FX_RACK section here... This is simply to keep the mic under control shutting down the channel when no input sound is present...... you also get a mute switch for the whole unit too.... and there are a various metering LED's on the box too....

Well, if you want all the tech spec's hit the link on the right and go over to check it out - All the mag's gave this unit a massive YES vote !!... Joe Meek stuff is very well rated... This unit's been out a while, but it's been added to DT as this is one of those bits of kit rarely discussed at DT yet so indispensible for any pc muso wanting to get decent vocals or any mic source recorded.... in the following months, i'm going to add alot more of these lesser know or thought about components in the home-studio chain to the DT pages... The B1 gets place of honour as the first mic-pre-amp added to dancetech lists - ... at this price, what excuse do you have now ?....

Alot of new users will never have heard their stuff recorded thru a mic-amp, even on a mixer, - I can tell you straight, if you use a mic and a pc card, one of these baby's will offer you a massive improvement on mic quality for your recordings, and even better if the mic itself is of decent quality too....

So... the HooterSound B1 ... made in Britain (has to be with that name huh ?!).... comments please ....

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