Tag: aphex
Event EMP-1 in the House
by Ari Koinuma on Jan.29, 2010, under Ari's Diary, Recording, Self Sufficient Musician, The Joy of Being on the Way
A new mic preamp just arrived — an old Event EMP-1 that I bought on eBay for $71.
The reason I got this is kinda long-winded story. My Firewire audio interface, Alesis IO14, bit the dust (which may not be its own fault — more on this later) so I bought Echo AudioFire4 to replace it. But to my disappointment the brand new unit that arrived, couldn’t turn on the phantom power. And to my further disappointment, I tested the same unit with a different computer and the phantom power did come on — so the problem, it appears, is my MacBook’s Firewire connection. I thought it odd that my Alesis just up and died, when it just sat in my studio (it may or may not be broken — so far my tests are inconclusive).
So, I faced the dilemma: AudioFire seemed to be working flawlessly except that it couldn’t provide phantom power to my condenser mic. Do I return it and pick a different unit after I went through all the research and picked out one that seem to meet my needs and have a solid reputation, or do I replace my computer, or… do I simply find a phantom power source? I chose the last option (I had just replaced the hard drive on my MacBook, so I wasn’t quite ready to go through another trauma of migrating all my data to another computer), but as I looked for a phantom power device, I thought, why not just get a used preamp, instead of just a phantom power source?
I was looking at M-Audio DMP-3, which has a very good reputation among home recordists for being clean and good bang for buck. I also looked at Symetrix 202 and Aphex 107 as well. Then this EMP-1 caught my eye. Apparently it’s an old unit that’s long been discontinued and I only found one review on it. But the review was good and also Event’s reputation as a manufacturer of fine studio monitors (I use the also long-discontinued Tria System as my main monitors) felt good to me, so I decided to bid what I thought was a justifiable amount for taking the risk of buying an old, little-known preamp.
So far all I did was plug it in and confirmed that everything was working, so more on what it can do later.
