To clear a few things up…. The gear that I designed for my company ‘Joemeek’ always had my signature on the front. When the trademark was sold to PMI, the new owner decided to redesign everything, and all manufacturing moved to China. I hasten to add that for the market that he was selling to, the equipment was (and is) nicely designed, well built and works, it just uses a slightly different design philosophy.
As for the enhancers…. the first enhancers were in the ‘brick’, originally called the ‘Voice Channel’. That carried over into the first of the 1U units called the VC1, but we had problems of reliability with a particular chip in the enhancer and so I redesigned it, and, I think, improved the sound of it. We used the new circuit in the early VC3, and it’s that one that I think you are talking about. After a production run of about 250 VC3 units the feedback we got was that people preferred to have a simple EQ rather than the enhancer….. I always thought… and knew that they were wrong! The best ‘voice channels’ we made were the combination of a good mic amp, an optical compressor and an enhancer, all available in those early VC3s.
Sadly, there is no market for a product like the ‘brick’ nowadays…. there are just not enough engineers who realise that this is the very best combination for getting a beautiful voice sound. (My P110 is good, but it could have been even better without the EQ and with an enhancer…. but then no-one would buy it!)
Back to the ‘lineage’….. The first VC1s and VC3s were plain green with black lettering. Just to make it more interesting, we introduced some gold lettering for a while, but the design was the same. Then we dropped the enhancer and put in the EQ and it became the VC1Q and VC3Q. At that time I was developing a new ‘unburstable’ mic amp that had a brilliant performance and was very resistant to mic cable problems….. this was the VC1QCS, and I’m not sure that we made any VC3QCS units, but I could be wrong. Anyway, that was the last model before we sold the trademark.
So, in short, the very early VC3 units were excellent, but if there was a fault it was usually the enhancer and they were a dog to repair. But if you find an example working well today, then it’s unlikely to go wrong! 