It seems right now there is a huge influx of preamp designs based on other vintage equipment or popular circuits, but Alta Moda Audio have gone against the grain and incorporated their own design in the AM-30 Preamp. This very straight-forward looking preamp says you can go from clean signal to saturated analog goodness. Judging by the input and output knobs, this seems to be easily obtained. I’m hoping we can get an AM-30 to review so keep your eyes open for that.
The first preamp offering from Alta Moda Audio, the AM-30 is in a class of its own. Not contrived or cloned from other designs, the AM-30 is truly unique in its approach to microphone pre-amplification.
The Class-A transformerless electronics of the AM-30 are fully discrete and wide bandwidth. Clean at lower gain settings, the AM-30 can be smoothly over-driven by increasing input level or gain. Where other preamps would harshly hard-clip when pushed, the AM-30 smoothly begins to saturate, adding rich, low-order harmonics to the signal.
With its exceptional performance on a wide range of sources such as guitars, drums, bass and vocals, the AM-30 delivers a sound that is big, punchy, bold and clear.
Its high input impedance and high headroom make the AM-30 great on line level signals too; perfect for re-amping guitars or warming up previously recorded tracks and loops.
And like all Alta Moda Audio products, the AM-30 preamp is entirely hand-built in the USA, and uses some of the finest components available.GAIN control
An 11-position rotary switch sets overall gain of the first amplifier stage. Unlike other transformerless designs, this first stage has soft, even-order harmonic overload characteristics, similar to a vacuum tube triode.
OUTPUT control
Controls the output level of the AM-30. It is a true continuous fader; it ranges from “0” up to an additional 6 dB of overall boost.
Signal presence light
To make recording session setup easier, the AM-30 is equipped with a simple “signal present” indicator light. Since it is difficult to clip the AM-30’s front end (and better to judge sound quality by ear), no clip indicator is needed.
DIRECT INPUT
A standard 1/4″ phone jack allows instruments such as bass and keyboards to be amplified directly. This FET-based circuit drives the input of the preamp just as a microphone would.
500-Series Rack Compatability
The AM-30 is compatible with any 500 series rack system which has 48V phantom power available. To achieve its maximum headroom, the AM-30 effectively uses all three available power supply rails for its power source.
Price: $499
For more information, visit http://altamodaaudio.com/am30.html
