Audient ASP008 Class A Preamplifier

All 10s? You bet. The ASP008 by Audient is by far
one of the best sounding preamps I have heard and
I've used quite a lot of stuff out there, however this
one is in a league of it's own.

An eight channel preamp with two high quality DIs
on the front and quite a lot of options for playing around
with sound via the three impedance selector. You're given
the option of the default 5000? followed by 200 and 1200.
Switching between the three impedance options opens up
some new fun for engineers and more manufacturers seem
to be adding this type of feature in today's engineering world
to give us more uses out of our microphones.

In playing around with the ASP, I came to the
conclusion that leaving the impedance selector alone
is the best sounding option for the most part, though
I can see it being beneficial for giving an electric guitar
a different tonality or perhaps a snare.

Moving on, we get to the buttons on this flashy silver box.
The first button option is the phantom power switch which,
you guessed it, works like any other .

After that, on channels 1 and 2 only, you have the INST/DI
switch which allows you to pop a bass guitar, electric, keys,
etc and hammer out some awesome and either reamp or utilize
one of the various amp modelers out there. CH 1/2 are also
the only ones with a -20dB pad.

The next button on down is the Line selector, for switching
to line input over XLR and changes the impedance to 10k?.

After the line selection, you get your typical phase flip
button so your drums and guitars don't sound all wacky,
don't forget to flip it!

We come to the final button on the channels themselves
which are the HPFs and they are mega musical, smooth variable
filters that are 12dB/octave from 25 to 250Hz. They really do
sound awesome. If you've used Sonimus Satson, yeah, it's on
that level of smoothness if not more, after all, it is a hardware filter.

On the back are all your I/O options. AES/EBU, ADAT and Wordclock connection through a typical BNC cable.

All in all, for just under $2,000 per unit you get a lot of options
to toy around with and eight channels of clean, mostly transparent preamps.
I say mostly transparent because I do hear some color in there,
most notably how it handles low end which to my ears is very tight
yet weighty and the highs are quite pristine and the ASP gives an overall feeling of clean and there is plenty of gain to spare from this great preamp.

The last thing I have to say about it is if you have fat
fingers you probably won't like this particular pre, but grab
some tweezers and get to turning those knobs!

I highly recommend adding at least one to your arsenal.

There are no effects in the sample, only a limiter so it's easier to hear.
http://bit.ly/P6tGJm