Published 12/1/05
New limiter and preamp revive vintage designs
In an unusual move, US pro audio equipment manufacturers Chandler have teamed up with Abbey Road Studios to create a range of studio gear based on the classic EMI designs used in the studio in the ’60s and ’70s. And the first two ‘Abbey Road Special Edition’ models to come out of the partnership are the TG1 compressor and TG2 preamp.
The TG1 (below) is a recreation of the classic EMI TG12413 limiter used in the custom-built EMI recording and mastering consoles from the late 1960s, with which albums such as the Beatles’ Abbey Road (obviously) and Pink Floyd’s Dark Side Of The Moon were recorded. Extremely rare today, the original TG1 limiter was never commercially available and the only studios that had access to them were those owned by EMI.
Chandler’s new TG1 has been remade from the original design information and circuit board drawings for complete authenticity. The stereo 2U rackmount unit’s discrete, transformer-balanced circuitry is capable of warm and open compression in Comp mode or more radical and audible compression effects in Limit mode. It has authentic detented knobs and a pair of old-fashioned sideways VU meters displaying gain reduction.
One interesting feature is the THD switch, which allows the signal to bypass the compressor/limiter threshold but pass through the rest of the signal path as normal, effectively turning the TG1 into a harmonic distortion generator. It’s available now and costs £2579.
The new TG2 dual-channel preamp (below), which is based on the EMI TG12428 preamp, features mic and high-impedance instrument inputs, with the same discrete, transformer-balanced amplifiers as the TG1, and is extremely simple to operate.
For each of the two channels, there are Input Gain and Output Level ‘chicken-head’ control knobs, phantom-power and phase-reverse switches and the ‘DI’ switch, which is used to bypass the mic amp when connecting line- or instrument-level sources… and that’s it! A fourth switch is left blank to allow a range of custom options offered by Chandler to be fitted, such as mic input impedance switching. The TG2 is available now, and costs £1263.
T Unity Audio +44 (0)1440 785843.
