Louder Than Liftoff

Royal Blue British Channel Colour

$149.00USD

Assembled

Royal Blue is Louder Than Liftoff's take on the vintage Neve* console sound. This meticulously miniaturized channel strip adds the hallmark Neve thickness and richness to individual tracks and mixes.

The circuit is based on the 1081 Channel Amplifier from the 80-Series recording consoles of the 70's. This legendary mic/line preamp and equalizer module featured discrete transistor amplifiers and transformer-coupled input and output stages. Its powerful, yet musical equalizer section was state of the art for its time with a whopping 6 bands.

Louder than Liftoff miniaturized the essence of this classic to fit within the space limitations of the Colour format. Multiple transistor amplifier stages drive a custom steel output transformer that offers the characteristic big tone one of the original LO2567. They even recreated the 4.7 kHz Upper Presence shelving EQ per the original circuit and carefully dialed in a fixed 5 dB boost that sounds divine on just about everything.

Features

Inspired by 1081 modules used in vintage Neve* 80 Series consoles
Discrete transistor circuitry adapted from BA306 and BA338 Neve* amplifiers
Tantalum capacitors and BC axial coupling caps like original design
Custom American made steel output transformer
Switchable 4.7 kHz "Upper Presence" shelving boost

Assembled and tested by Louder Than Liftoff.

*Neve is a registered trademark of AMS Neve Ltd.

Samples

Magical

Ran a Fen-tone ribbon mic through this and the presence boost makes it sound like there’s a blanket coming off the mic. Can’t wait to see how it sounds on a bass guitar without the presence boost. I have the Red25 discrete op amp, tm79, and 15IPS Tape also… don’t get me wrong those colours are excellent but the royal blue is officially my favorite.

Sounds quite good!

I built two colour pallets and bought 2 royal blue, two hitmaker, an aubergine, a CTX and TM79 which I buggered and awaiting a part to hopefully fix. I put all the stems through in mono and it sounds finished and shiny and punchy. I’m looking forward to strapping two royal blues and hitmaker 4000s on the ass end of my Fostex A8 LR into mix down of a tascam 32, sent from a teac model 3 mixer. Likely will dope 👍 I’d buy this stuff absolutely, and building it was super cool and relaxing.

The “make it sound better” knob

I don’t get it. I rendered every track on a death metal project im mixing through this thing, with tracks I didn’t record, and suddenly this mix went from sounding like a home studio mix to one that sounds professional. My client said “whatever that new gear is that you used, it really polished this mix up.” Yep. Best 150 bucks I’ve spent all year. You can’t buy a plugin for this cheap that will ever come close! I’m telling all my engineer buddies. Now my problem is I need two of these so I can speed up rendering every track next time. My new favorite knob!!

Wow

What can I even say, it’s like I have the sound of a Neve 1081 right here in my own studio. Completely blown away and definitely planning on getting more!