Tele through a Pro captured with an all tube signal chain

So, I've been going nuts with this damn Ampex 351 preamp and ribbon combo. It just works so great on everything. i tend to obsess with the latest thing I know, but this is pretty smokin.

I have an extremely bright Tele and a painfully bright Pro. Slap a condenser in front of the center of the 12" Jensen P12n and your ears will bleed. The Langevin pres are thick enough to use a 414 and a ribbon for blending to achieve some remarkable tones. That's 2 mics pointing at one speaker cone (phase) through a chunky sounding pre/mixer.

Enter the Ampex, and just the ribbon covers the tonal range perfectly. Now add an amazing tube EQ like the FEARN after it and one gets some fantastic choices. THEN, add an inward connections tube limiter to the party and you've got one heck of a recording channel.

Yeah, I hear the upper distortion, that's the fuzz you get when a loud amp hits a mic that goes to a  preamp that isn't designed to handle fast, spikey things well. I mean, I could just turn down or use a hotplate to attenuate and control this effect, but that fuzzy spit on top makes the guitar stand up and say "Hey!" in the mix. Dirt and fuzz are good things to have, even on "clean" sources sometimes.

Ampex 351 with a royer 121 for tracking a mono drum kit

It's hard to beat a ribbon mic for drums. The hi hat is the biggest obstacle when dealing with condensers and dynamics. A ribbon will happily "miss" the top or beginning of the odd harmonic transient a hi hat or cymbal presents. So, if I am planning on compressing a mono picture of a complicated thing like a drum kit, a ribbon mic is my friend.

The trade off is the lack of top end response and not as quick detail. We mustn't forget the power of component matching though. If we have a 414 hooked up to a transistor preamp, we got a hot mess. Plug the same mic into a transformer preamp, we have a party. This particular Royer 121 mic LOVES the Ampex 351 preamp. The two go together like hot pie and my mouth.

Today I was trying to get an explosive room sound with a pair of beyer 160's and the Trident. Combined with close mics through the Langevin. It sounded pretty great, but not chunky enough.

I included the mono royer through the ampex and I got exactly what I was looking for.

Studer A80 repair 140110

Jake Swanson came in today to repair an issue with the 16 track's counter. I've had some rough luck figuring out the issue.

First, the autolocator took a dump after I returned from a vacation last summer. That's right, I've been using tape every day for half a year or more with no autolocator or counter function. It's no biggie, just listen as you rock ff /rvrs back and forth a bit to find the start, then use edit mode to really nail down where the first note hits.

My friend Tony had a go looking at the interface power supply for the autolocator and found proper voltage readings. Perhaps the little keypad itself is faulty? He discovered the molex connector on board the Studer's transport counter cards was not making contact, developed a work around and the counter showed all zeros but no actual counting function.

When I bought the 4 track 1/2" A80, I thought I would be able to figure out the counter problem by swapping cards from one machine to the other. All I managed to do was to cause smoke to billow out of the area of interest. Great. I've ruined the counter function on both machines. I learned some stuff along the way, but it caused more issues.

I recently found Jake Swanson and he came in a few weeks ago to try his luck figuring this counter issue out.

After Jake had a go repairing the basis board and checking voltage readings across the 2 other counter boards he discovered a grounding issue. With ground floating, voltage readings where twice what they should be. So, instead of 5.8 volts pos and neg, he was getting 10! He found the molex connector supplying the basis board was faulty at one pin (the ground), he re-tightened that sucker and viola, perfect voltage readings everywhere on all 3 counter related boards. Still no counter function.

Jake texted a friend at ATR Magnetics who pointed us to the e-prom chip. This is a programmable chip that decodes and clocks the counter. Or something like that :/ Apparently these chips fade over time and lose the original programming. Jake is under the impression that we need a replacement to move forward.

Now, where to find an e-prom chip that fits these Studers?