| compasspnt wrote on Sat, 11 February 2006 00:36 |
Roy and others,
Certainly the "original" Neve designs were great sounding, and are much revered. But have the later (say, the last thirty years' worth) of RN designs sounded great, or been so accepted?
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dear compasspnt-
yes and youssa!
an interesting thing happened to me on the way here today by way of 1972, i realized that one thing done very well, is well, one thing done very well. sure everything in the past three decades since the 'golden age' neve stuff came out is marvelous, but you know what, with many more bells and whistles, maybe sometimes too many. im not a technofreak that enjoys a lot of buttons, or eye wash stuff, but i really love the old look and utility of old analog radio AM-MW-FM transmitters with their analog leds and dbv meters etc, like the old telefunken stuff etc.
my lucky break happened by accident in 1971 when a regional impresario (i guess that we the name they used back then for douchebag, oops, i mean producer) heard me perform at a theatrical recital in high school and quickly threw me into a touring conservatory trained orchestra who backed the big names of the era, because i was a prodigy savant player as a teen that could do 4/4 brit glam (circa the bowie freak show) and switch to 5/4 straight ahead to a 3/4 classical waltz without missing a beat. does god have a sense of humor or what?
we all know how inconsistent the mfg process and parts were back then, so one amp head could have sounded great and the next identical model off-shelf totally different and crappy. i had a 1968 marshall plexi -100 and a 1973 marshall plexi - 50 that both had reactive load resistors and attenuators built for me way back then by a guru electronics engineer/physicist who worked for aramco who i knew before reactive loads like the palmer pdi-03 or now pga-04 were even conceived or developed so that i could use these in an orchestral big band situation. i lucked out and both my heads were one trick puppies and were magical tone wise.
i loved those p-t-p heads thru custom jbl/altec loaded cabs. albeit they always hummed like crap because i was overseas, and the power was 220v 50 cycles and always dirty, and marshalls are notorious for lousy grounds in the slp line, so the guru managed to build a circuit to kill the hum too. i think i paid like a buck twenty five for each, and the strat and lp and archtop i had then cost me another two and a half bills. $500 was big bucks back then. i played these until i retired the two amps and had a nice cremation ceremony in my back yard with music and flowers and a small entourage of forest animals guests when i stopped touring for good, because i had been touring with them since the early 70s and they were being held together by duct tape, roofing glue, staples, etc and had been rebuilt at least four times each because they kept blowing up, and once i took a hammer and smashed both their intestines to bits after a lousy show because i am a moron. but that
