While the good feedback that he received pleased Hardy, he was surprised by just how much his preamp cards pleased some people. At the time, there were a lot fewer mic pre-amps available than there are today. “I don’t know when the Massenburg came out, but the Massenburg and maybe the Sontech by Burgess MacNeil, but there were maybe a couple of others. Maybe the API pre-amps might have been available in some kind of somewhat usable form back then.” With fewer options to choose from, some people who “were either crazy enough or dedicated enough” added boxes and power transformers to convert them to stand-alone preamps. Hardy applied the basic design principles of his replacement cards to build the preamp for which he’s best known, the M-1, which he began selling in 1987. “There are three main things that show up in my various ads for the product. The first thing the signal sees when it comes in is the JT-16-B input transformer, which is the top of the line Jensen input transformer. I just think Jensen makes the absolute best audio transformers, and this is their best mic-input model. So the signal first sees the transformer, then it goes into the 990 discrete op-amp. The third feature is that there are no capacitors, coupling capacitors, anywhere in the signal path. Capacitors can cause problems; they can cause degradation to the signal. There’s a problem with capacitors known as dielectric absorption. A capacitor is just two conductors separated by an insulator. Literally, speaker cables are capacitors; they are also resistors, and if there’s any kind of curve to them they’re inductors I suppose. There’s always an insulator between the plates. Now you can get capacitors that have Mylar as the insulator, or polypropylene, or polycarbonate or polystyrene, or Teflon or this or that or on and on. And then there are the larger electrolytic capacitors, which still have an insulator, but it gets into a whole different territory. The dielectric can actually absorb some of the signal as the signal moves from one plate to the other. You want to block the DC voltages; that’s the main reason for using them in a signal path — DC voltages will creep in and you want to stop that. So the capacitor blocks the DC but lets the AC through. But that dielectric in the middle there can absorb a little bit of the signal and then release it a short time later, and that can cause a little bit of smearing of the audio signal. It’s better or worse depending on the type of capacitor. I know there are all kinds of transformer-less mic preamp companies out there, and they would probably say ‘oh, transformers, you know, they’re terrible, all sorts of phase shift and ringing and core saturation.’ Sometimes it comes down to, well, who’s got the biggest problem, is my transformer a bigger problem than your capacitors? So I’ll just leave it at that. Your mileage may vary.” He feels that the Jensen JT-16-B which he uses in the M-1 “belongs in a category all its own. Part of the deal is it’s not whether it’s transformer-less or transformer-coupled, part of the deal is, ‘how well is the design executed.’ That’s true in so many things in life.” “When I first started making the M-1 mic pre-amps in 1987, I just crossed my fingers and hoped that anybody would even kind of like them. And it just seems that most people like them a lot. I’ve heard some people tell me that they have many pre-amps to choose from, but they find themselves going back to the M-1 much more often than any other preamp. So many people, they’re beating their heads against the wall, trying to get things just to sound right. I remember bringing an M-1 to a local studio in the earlier days of the M-1, and the engineer, Danny Leake, he’s a local engineer here in Chicago and he’s got an excellent reputation. He’s traveled around the world doing all kinds of things. He was expecting me to bring an M-1 up, and I brought it up. He was in the middle of doing some vocal overdubs. This was at Universal Recording, while they were still in existence. He was using one of these legendary old Neve consoles that everybody seeks, and thinks it’s the greatest thing to come down the road. So as soon as I walked in, he stopped the vocal overdubs, he patched the microphone into the M-1. Instead of being in the old Neve and a Pultech equalizer—he had been using this combination of the Neve and a Pultech equalizer to get the high frequencies back where they belonged after the old Neve had screwed them up. So he listened to the M-1, he said, ‘All right, take ‘71 or whatever. The vocalist was singing, and after about 8 seconds, I heard Danny say ‘Whoa.’ And that was his way of saying whoa; this is just great, just by itself. This is so much better than the old Neve and the Pultech equalizer. People are just looking for; I think 97% of the time they just want things to sound the way they sound. And the M-1 seems to do a much better job of doing that than most pre-amps. Everybody is entitled to their opinion, everybody can get the kind of sound they want to get.” “Another quote was ‘Even the producer could tell the difference.’ I like to poke fun at producers, you know. A true story, a long story but a true one, where even the producer noticed when they switched from the M-1 back to an old Neve in fact. A whole other story where it was an M-1 and an old Neve. So, to make a long story short, an M-1 failed. The engineer called me in a panic. I sent him a new 990 because I figured that was the problem. Gets off the phone realizing that he’s not going to be able to use the M-1 for the rest of the day. So he plugs the stuff back into the old Neve, which was one of the reasons they went to this particular studio in New York, A&R Studios. And called everybody back in, they started recording. And everybody, including the producer, noticed the difference, and they refused to continue the session until the M-1 was fixed. So you know, there’s an example of an old Neve.” “I keep thinking of Blind Melon Chitlin, the Cheech & Chong fictitious character. It’s this fictitious old blues harmonica player who’s just this burned-out, practically just a pile of dust for a human being. But somebody like that I imagine, they probably have some just beat-to-crap microphone they plug into some guitar amp; that’s the mic preamp is this guitar amp that’s probably 50 years old and the tubes are about to fall out, and everything about it is screwed up completely. And it gives him exactly the sound he’s looking for. Well, for something like that, fine. You do the Silvertone amplifier, you know, the Sears Silvertone amp, with a horrible microphone and it’s great. But the guy that wants to then record that, if they manage to hire a recording engineer to do this Blind Melon Chitlin album. He might put some fine microphone in front of that amplifier, plug it into an M-1 mic preamp to capture it exactly the way it’s supposed to sound. Anything anybody wants to do is fine. If it works, salute it. If it doesn’t, you know, try something else. There are only like two or three hundred mic pre-amps to choose from these days.” “When you get into the details of a discrete design versus a monolithic design, you realize that there is at least a potential for much better performance. Now again, there are better and better monolithic op-amps as time goes on. And there are certainly ways that you could make a discrete op-amp so badly that you’d be better off with a monolithic op-amp. Just being monolithic doesn’t mean anything, other than the fact that it’s monolithic. It could be bad monolithic, it could be great monolithic. I mean discrete, well, whatever - either way. Evaluate and make up your own mind. But there are lots of reasons why this circuit could be better and in fact ends up being better. I write at somewhat great length in my 990 data package that I include, I explain to people that if you were to look inside of a monolithic op-amp, you would find a little chip of silicon that’s typically about a sixteenth of an inch square; that’s the whole circuit. And somehow on that sixteenth of an inch square of silicon, they have to put dozens of transistors and resistors and diodes and capacitors and whatever else. And it’s amazing that they can get all those radically different kinds of components fabricated on one tiny chip of silicon. Now it starts off with a 6-inch or 8-inch wafer and they cut ‘em up into thousands of little op-amps.
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