SCA - Opinions?

[tee boy]

Hey all,
Just wondering if anyone had any thoughts regarding the Seventh Circle stuff. I hear they are decent, and the price's are phenomenal! How would you guys compare their 1272 to other clones - Vintech, Averill, Great River etc?

Cheers!

[eventime]

My $.02.

The N72 was the very first 'good' mic pre i had ever used, and to this very day nothing has compared to it. It was my friends, unfortunately, so I don't personally own one. They never seem to have them in stock when I have the cash to buy one. Now it seems as though they do, and I emailed Tim to try and get one.

I haven't heard the averills or the vintechs, but the N72 would definetely be higher up in my chain then my ME-1NV. No lies.

Good stuff.

[tee boy]

Awesome, thanks for the input!

I think whats thowing me is the price tag - these bad boys cost about the same as a Platinum series! Can they really be up to the quality of other Neve clones, costing 3 or 4 times the amount? Or, i guess a more constructive question would be 'why are they so cheap'? Where are the cut backs being made, and how much of a difference do they make?

Actually, now that i think of it Im sure i read something about one ex-neve engineer saying that these were among the most authentic of all the clones. Is this correct, or have i been day dreaming again?

[Screws]

Hi,

I have a Seventh Circle rack with 2 - N72's and 2- J99's powered by the PS02 power supply.

First let me say that I have never heard a real Hardy Twin Servo, or M1, Neve 1073 or 1272, or any of the clones out there, so my opinions will not be comparisons to the stuff the SCA designs purport to emulate.

I've personally recorded in the last few years with various tube and solid state preamp of the Avalon, JoeMeek, Presonus, Grace, Mackie and Peavey VMP ilk, and in the old days recorded in studios with Trident, Neve and SSL mixers, so I do have a trace memory of high quality sound, albeit 25-30 years old.

The N72 is a 1272 style preamp, and Geoff Tanner (former Neve employee and now owner/designer of Aurora Audio) has stated that his impression of the schematic led him to feel that the SCA version of the 1272 was the only one he had seen that was "done right", since the 1272 was designed as a line amp, not as a mic preamp, requiring some modifications to properly get it to mic levels.

I don't know about all that, but the N72 is rock and roll all the way. By that, I mean creamy, fat with a great edge. Low mid bump adds just a bit of girth to stuff, while the upper mid edge helps define things a bit. I find I use the N72's on Kick, Snare, Electric Guitar Amps, Rock Bass, some Rock Vocals and Sampled keys that need weight and attitude. I love pushing the input to make it fat and crunchy, while backing off the output so as not to overdrive my convertors.

The J99 is a version of the Hardy Twin Servo design, and is available with op amps from Hardy, Millennia Media, Forsell and others. The sound of this preamp is huge and musical, giving stuff a 3 dimensionality without really accentuating any frequencies over others. When I first tried it, I ran a cheap large diaphragm condensor mic through my Peavey VMP-2 tube amp and then through the J99, going back and forth to compare. I tried level matching by watching the meters, and even when the Peavey VMP was louder it sounded as though the VMP was limiting the bandwidth of the vocal compared to the J99. Almost like hearing a voice through the telephone versus hearing it in person, though this is an over exaggeration.

I find the J99 excellent on ballad vocals or any other sensitive vocals that need to occupy a larger space, acoustic guitars (OMG), jazz bass, piano, rhodes, overheads for a bigger sounding kit, percussion, voice overs (wow), D.I. electric guitar and more.

I think the price is low because this guy does this stuff out of his studio himself, and doesn't have a lot of employees or overhead to shell out. That's also probably why it takes a bit of time to get the stuff. I waited for more than a month after I sent the money to get mine. and I'd do it again in a flash - and will when I save up enough for their new API clones.