M16

Description

16 Channel Wideband front end / mic pre / mixer

The M16 is a prayer answerer.  The unit presents in a compact 4u format, 16 wide band, ultra-sensitive mic/line pre amplifiers with individual studio balanced outputs and a separate ultra-wide band stereo mix bus.  As a companion to your external audio interfaces, the M16 is the link between your recorder and the real-world microphones, instruments and sound generators giving you ultimate flexibility and quality.

The 16-transformer input microphone/line preamplifiers use ‘current mode’ technology invented by Ted Fletcher in the 1970s.  Over the years, this design has been honed to remarkable performance.

“I have been visiting studios and engineers both in the UK and in the Southern USA in the last few months and suddenly everyone is crying out for super-class front-ends that can accurately transcribe not just the usual audio band, but also the super-high frequencies that we can now record properly with higher samplerates. Bandwidth limits of 2OHz to 2OKHz are just not good enough anymore; I have recently prepared a special P9 (Ted’s definitive Equaliser) with a response that is only 1dB down at 100KHz, specially for a mastering studio in the UK, and the M16 has to be capable of handling performances like that…. and must sound like a million dollars.” Ted Fletcher

Each input has:

• XLR mic input,
• TRS balanced Line/Instrument input,
• switchable phantom power,
• switchable high pass filter,
• switchable phase reverse,
• mic/line input switch.
• switchable channel mute (to the mixer),
• Solo button
• TRS Channel insert,
• TRS Individual balanced line output,
• LED channel metering,
• Pan control,
• Mixer channel gain control.

Once again this is a product designed to meet a real need in Ted’s own experimental studio, and the need of a number of renowned engineers; a need for very high performance front-ends, and a practical ‘stem’ mixer with a bandwidth and definition suitable for 96K+ recording.

The microphone amplifiers are transformer input coupled with the input stage operating in class A. The input amplifier operates in current mode so that the input transformer works with zero flux giving extended bandwidth of 8Hz to 100KHz, unmeasurable 3rd harmonic distortion within the audio band, and noise performance equivalent to best conventional circuits.

Microphone input levels can be from -75 to 0dBu and the overload margin of 30dB is maintained at all gain settings.

The mixer stages use balanced bus technology. This gives extreme low noise and distortion, and maintains the audio performance right through to the balanced line and monitor output XLRs.

The mixer is capable of 128dB dynamic range.

The complete M16 system sits in 4U of rack space and is driven by an external power supply.

Other features

The main stereo output is a high-quality balanced output suitable for mastering – a replacement for brittle sounding virtual mixers!

Output connections are TRS balanced jacks, with an additional pair of separately buffered XLR connectors for the main output.

Stabilised power is provided by a separate free-standing power supply.  The external power supply means absolute low noise and even performance across all 16 channels.