So here’s the new addition to the rack…which I don’t have room for yet… Its a custom-built Harrison preamp made by Jack Conners, chief engineer at Interlochen Public Radio in Michigan. When I worked there (oh so many summers ago) he had just completed a 4-channel preamp for the studio and was continuing to complete the others he had. One of the other student engineers kept nagging on him to sell a unit to him, and after a few years Jack finally caved in and I happened to nab it!
As of this writing I have not taken the preamp out on a recording trip, but I’ll have some more comments and possibly some samples against my Millennia and the DPA’s.
A quote from Jack Conners (maker):
I worked at Harrison from 1984 to 1990. I started out wiring console frames, and eventually worked in final checkout and customer service/commissioning. Being that I recorded a lot of classical music with just a stereo pair, and that Harrison mic preamps were recognized as “top performers’, I thought it would be cool to have a simple set up with two Harrison mic pres connected directly to two Harrison line drivers. One day the production manager at Harrison said “We’ve got a lot of old circuit boards and stuff we need to get rid of”. I offered to buy the whole lot (at a ridiculous low price, of course!). In that box of stuff were about 20 Series Four mic preamp boards and a bunch of line driver boards. So, my dream eventually became reality. It wasn’t until I moved back to Michigan in 1991 that I started putting these things together in a rack-mount box. I built three two-channel units, quickly sold one to an engineer in Chicago, and used one to record the Grand Rapids Symphony for a few years. I still have one of the original units, and one of the original three is the “Telefunken” unit that you have now. (The telefunken badge came from a multi-track remote control unit I had in Nashville.) Since then, I’ve built two four-channel units for the studio at Interlochen, one four-channel unit for myself, and a two-space, two-channel unit with VU meters for my own use.
The construction is pretty simple. I copied the I/O circuit from a Harrison Series Four console and simply connect the output of the mic preamp to the Harrison line driver card. I built the bipolar 15 volt supply for the audio and added a 48 volt supply for phantom powering condenser mics. The hard part was finding the 10K ohm reverse taper audio pots for the attenuators. The Burr-Brown op-amps do make it a little bit quieter and (I think) they sound better. The units compare in specs to the John Hardy and API mic pres that we use and most people think that they sound “more transparent and open”.
You can find more about Harrison at www.harrisonconsoles.com (which oddly enough uses Joomla CMS), including a paragraph about how many musical albums have been recorded direct to tape using the preamp/line drivers.
