Specialised Audio - What do we mean?

Technology is ever-evolving, largely dictated by price and size. Electronic components shrink allowing smaller, more light-weight products to be designed.

However, audio is a subjective area, and there are many fanatics out there who crave the sounds they once heard as a child, or on their favourite LP or CD. Displaced technologies must be resurrected to satisfy the needs of this ever-demanding customer.

Things like thermionic valves / tubes, audio-coupling transformers, discrete transistor circuits, un-damped amplifier designs can all impart their own characteristic quality on a particular audio product. Customers are familiar with this concept and so there is a thriving market out there!

Guitar / Musical Instrument Amplifiers

Musical Instrument amplifiers contribute as much to a musician's tone as the instrument itself. This is why the design has to be done exactly right! This includes the circuit topology, the technology utilised as well as the choice of acoustic enclosure as well as the choice of speaker driver(s).

Valve designs have achieved legendary status and will always be around. However, very good results can be achieved using purely solid-state technologies, providing these technologies are applied in a way that is sympathetic to the classic circuit topologies used with their valve predecessors.

Simon Keats has a wealth of knowledge in this area, helped by the fact that used to be employed by one of the UK's leading musical instrument manufacturers.

Guitar Accessories

Simon Keats has designed numerous successful effects pedals and continues to work with big-name brands to offer analogue-assistance.

Analogue effects are highly sought after and offer a smoother more natural sound when compared to digital units.

High-end pedal designs may feature specialised components such as Valves / Tubes, "Bucket-Brigade" ICs, Opto-Couplers and Class-A discrete circuitry.

Other guitar accessories include cable-drivers and signal buffers, speaker simulators, active guitar electronics, electronic-tuners, signal /isolators...

Studio Equipment - Mic Preamps

In the early days, mixing consoles features all-discrete circuitry, and so the designs were reasonably complex, and a lot of thought went into creating the designs. Also, rather importantly, each designer went about designing their product in a specific way, depending on their-own personal preferences and experience.

The event of ICC's made the majority of analogue design too easy for many companies, and microphone ppre-amps became generic and sterile - lacking character and in many cases quality. To make things worse, large-scale mixers often utilised cheap, generic op-amps to keep the end-unit cost down (consider the number of op-amps used in a single multi-channel mixer design).

It's for this reason that there is now a healthy market in high-quality, stand-alone microphone ppre-amps, designed to be used as an alternative to the "in-desk" pre-amps found in modern consoles.

As usual different technologies can be employed for a different character. Many high-end pre-amps sport an interesting mixture of harmonic distortion when pushed hard or even medium-hard. Also, we can clearly see controlled artefacts in the frequency response, to add presence to vocals and solo instruments.

Studio Equipment - Outboard

There are several indispensable tools found in all recording studios. These are hardware-based analogue signal processors. Things like Compressors, Limiters, Gates, EQs and numerous other variations on a theme!

Each type of processor can, and has over the last 60 years, been implemented in vastly different ways. Each time utilising different technologies and design approaches to those chosen before. Each unit has it's signature-sound and can be used in the studio to enhance the sound on individual instruments in the mix, or else to evoke a new character to the entire mix.