Louder Than Liftoff
Royal Blue British Channel Colour
$149.00
- Fully 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.
Customer Reviews
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!
I ran a few full mixes through a pair of Royal Blues and I love the effect it has on them! I can see this becoming a regular part of my workflow,
I love the tone of this thing, if you dial in just the right amount, it adds that high-end gloss that you get from quality audio equipment, however I can't whole-heartedly recommend the Colour Palette in general, I may have a faulty unit, but all three cards in my unit are quite noisy. I have enquired with DIYRE about this but they simply sent my email back with no actual response!
The Royal Blue is a great tool to even out dynamics in a vocal chain, and to add a touch of analog polish to stark digital recordings of any source. Unless driven to its limit, the effect is subtle to hear in solo, but the tracks you apply it to sit in the mix better at a lower overall volume. What’s not to like?
this thing sounds great! got two and ran my mixbus thru them and they def add that vibe, I want to get all of the console colours to try out
