 George
Shilling reviews:
Drawmer
Front End One MX60
In
the high-end 'voice channel' market, one can easily forget that
Drawmer were an early entrant with the Vacuum Tube 1960. They now
enter the crowded budget end of this market with the feature packed
'Front End One' MX60.
Buy recording equipment in the music studio shop
The
‘One’ is a comprehensive mic/line channel for studio or live
use. Drawmer have drawn on their many years of dynamic processing
experience to encompass everything anyone might require of such a
unit into a compact and very competitively-priced product.
I
was initially surprised by the sheer physical weight of the fairly
shallow 1U box. For a cheap unit, construction is extremely robust,
an internal metal brace spanning the entire width and holding most
of the pots via long shafts above an enormous single circuit board.
Upon this are mounted rows upon rows of small components. The bobbin
mains transformer is heavy, but not especially large. There are
separate top, bottom, front and back panels, with double section
integral rack ears.
The
front panel is smartly black-painted over brushed aluminium, which
makes legending clear, despite the small lettering necessitated by
the sheer number of features on the unit. The knobs are all small
and stiffly damped, much the same as those on the ubiquitous DS 201
Dual Gate. The pointers are clear, but their tiny size makes small
adjustments and recalls a little tricky. Every button has an LED
except the Male/Female button on the De-Esser. There are LED meters
for Input, Output and Compression, and LEDs for the Gate and De-Esser
operation, making it easy to see what is happening.
The
back features Mic Input XLR, Line Out XLR, and balanced and
unbalanced line jacks operating at +4dBu and -10dBu respectively.
All line connections can be used simultaneously which is useful for
level conversion. In addition there is a TRS insert jack which comes
before any internal processing or metering. An IEC mains socket is
fitted. Voltage conversion is tricky, as one has to remove the lid,
change the internal fuse and relocate links, but I would imagine
this an infrequent requirement.
The
front panel is logically arranged. On the left is a high-impedance
Instrument jack with a selector switch, a pad and a useful Bright
switch which adds some well-chosen upper-mids to liven up flat
sounding D/I'd guitars. A +20dB button boosts quiet electric guitar
signals. Next to the Gain pot is a Mic/Line button, a Phase switch,
Phantom Power button and 100Hz HP filter. The Mic amplifier was
commendably clean and very quiet, if unsurprisingly a little
‘smaller’ sounding next to the fine vintage Neve I had for
comparison.
The
Dynamics, EQ and Tubesound sections can be individually selected.
The Dynamics section includes a simple Gate with Threshold knob and
two Release settings, and this works well with no clicks. The De-Esser
compresses only high frequency content. A switch marked Male/Female
shifts the frequencies affected. However, it is a little tricky to
set up without losing brightness on non-sibilant parts of the vocal,
and rarely needs to be set higher than 1½ (on a scale going up to
10). The Compressor features auto attack and release and sounded
similar to earlier transistor Drawmers, which I confess would not be
my first choice on vocals. Like the De-Esser, it can be vicious, and
sounds ‘squashy’ if set with a ratio higher than 2:1.
The
EQ has basic shelving HF and LF cut/boost at 4.25kHz and 100Hz
respectively, and a wide-ranging fully parametric Mid. With 18dB
cut/boost on all bands this is extremely powerful and works well but
sounds little more refined than the EQ you would encounter on a
typical budget 8-buss console.
The
Tubesound section was very enjoyable, its potential for subtlety
making up for the powerful nature of the other sections. Despite the
name, there are no ‘tubes’ in this unit: a transistor circuit
simulates the subtle distortions of real valves. There are three
Drive knobs, Lo, Mid and Hi, which split the audio band at 350Hz and
2kHz. I often found these preferable to the EQ for tone shaping,
adding warmth and ‘glow’. One has to be careful with vocals, as
this can introduce some fuzziness, and turning the three Drive knobs
clockwise can push the output limiter into action. One must
compensate by reducing input gain or compressor output. Indeed, the
gain structure requires careful setting. When the input is set at a
normal level to drive the compressor, the Compressor Output Gain
must often be reduced in order not to drive the output limiter,
which is always in circuit before the Output Gain knob.
This
unit has a good Mic Preamplifier and an astonishing number of
features for the price. The manual is clear and straightforward. But
paradoxically, there are almost too many knobs to twiddle in a vocal
recording situation, especially for the novice who is likely to
purchase one. It is quite easy to overdo it with the Dynamics and EQ
sections. When mixing, however, this is a versatile tool, and great
for rescue jobs. Buy one, you won’t find better value, but as the
old aftershave advert goes, ‘Be careful how you use it!’
Buy Aphex and other recording equipment in the music studio shop
Reproduced
with kind permission from www.George.Shilling.Com. Copyright ©1997
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