Too good to be true?!

I certainly thought so but it's blowing me away still! Just received my order the other day. Had my first test recording session: Drum set, and guitars. Holy crap this thing sounds amazing! Color in all the subtle ways you want it! You're microphones will love you for it, no matter how you use them!

Great Price

The tube gain does distort too easily, but seeing as the knobs are infinitely adjustable, this is just a quirk to learn. Once you find the sweet spots, you'll have no trouble getting the sound you want out of this unit. And man, it sounds great. Plus having some crazy distortion options is kind of nice - I've used it on some vocal tracks to great effect. The compressor is tricky to use, I wouldn't recommend using it on the fly. It is useful for going back and leveling out transients after the fact, though. The ADAT works wonderfully and helped me expand my front end by 8 inputs- nice! Considering 4 of the twin-finity preamps would be $2800 separately, and this package throws in compressors and ADAT, it's a sweet deal.

Mind-blowing 4-710d

This unit is frightening - it does SO much and sounds great.

Wish I had more of these.

After reading and reading I bought this amp for my studio. Yea, the tubes can overdrive easily but if you pull back and let the tubes warm, man oh man, this preamp will give you that warm, silky sound you're looking for. I use this on everything. I love the solid state/tube options. Have solid state, or have 100% tube. Or somewhere in between, it's up to you. This item will make any mic sound good. However, you will notice that your cheap mic's may sound better, but still cheap. A better quality mic will definitely shine with this preamp.

Workhorse, especially in a project studio

The heart of my project rig has been a profire2626. I've been looking for a frontend upgrade (the stock octane pres are pretty blah), and this baby is the one! The expansion from 8 to 16 (4 more pres, 4 line-ins) is a welcome one, and it's worked seamlessly.

OH. And did I mention they sound Great? The blend knob provides ample but subtle enough tonal variety, and the compressor can really tame a dynamic performance in a musical way! All the useful bells and whistles (low cut, polarity switch, inserts line-ins and hi-Z inputs on every channel, not to mention the classy 'vintage' metering) make this by far the most versatile addition to an project studio!

4-710

Awesome!

Four Swiss Army Knives

Listen, this should be the first high-end pre for any project studio. And it's an excellent source of high quality, do it all pre's for bigger studios. It is incredibly versatile. The tube/solid state options give you very different sounds as the pre is pushed a bit. The Tube side will round off some of the high end and break up sweetly. I'm not a fan of the solid state side's breakup, at all, but it stays clean when pushed to higher levels. The one improvement I could see would be a separate gain control for tube and solid state sides so you could push the tube side a bit more and then blend in the overdriven sound with the clean solid state side as needed. But, this is rarely that big of a deal.

The compressor section is great. A fixed 4:1 ratio with either fast or slow attack will get you 90% of the sounds you're used to with an 1176. My one complaint here is that I wish the compressor had it's own input control. In order to get the compressor to hit hard, you have to crank the gain on the input quite a bit, which, depending on what the sound source is, can cause the pre to break up a bit. This works on the tube side on vocals as the tube breakup is sweet and pleasant, allowing the 1176 portion to smack the vocals smoothly or aggressively, depending how hard you hit it. However, it's harder to get large amounts of comp on the solid state side or on the tube side if you want to keep things perfectly clean without an input control for the compression circuit. What this means is that the 4-710d will fulfill all your compression needs on any recording that only needs slight compression. However, it still works as an awesome first compressor in a longer signal chain in the event that you need to use more compression via hardware or software.

But in all honesty, there's not much to complain about. The compression control isn't perfect, but as you get used to the unit, you start to find the sweet spots. The pre's themselves are high quality, and considering you get 4 at the cost of $500 each, they're already a good deal. Add in the compressors, and the pot gets sweeter. High quality A/D conversion . . . it gets sweeter still. Finally, the extra 4 line inputs plus the seemingly limitless routing options afforded by the send/return jacks on the 4 preamps make it compatible with any studio setup. Wanna patch in an EQ? Flip a switch to send the signal to the EQ and back into the pre. Wanna use another outboard compressor? Easy, flip a switch. Better yet, send the signal to an outboard compressor and route that signal back into one of the 4 line inserts on the back of the 4-710d. The send duplicates the signal from the preamp. Now you've got a clean, uncompressed sound plus the sound coming back from the compressor. Parallel compression. And you can do this with all four channels. Did I mention this thing is versatile?

This isn't a full 5 star piece in my opinion because there were a few small routing options that would have made this already versatile piece even more ridiculous. Separate input gain controls for the solid state and tube sides could have been useful. Also, an insert point after the pre but before the compressor would be nice, too, as then you could patch in other signals into the compressor or increase the compression provided by the 4-710d by gain staging a source (say, vocals) through the compressor on two channels. However, considering the cost of this thing and all that it already does plus the converter, it's really hard to complain. I've had my unit for about 7 months now and used it on a wide variety of projects. I've had no reliability issues, consistent sound, and easy integration into my studio setup. What more could you want?

Easy Tone Shaping

This unit is high quality and the sound is outstanding. It really lets you match the mic with the sound you want from that deep warm groove to a hotter sharper setting with all points in between. A little pricey for entry level but you are going to end up here anyway.

A Good Starting Point/Go BLA!!

I have many pres and this unit has the most of any as far as features and flexibility. To ADAT 4 channels of twinfinity and have another 4 inputs for other things is nice. The inputs on the front are indispensable for hardware routing as a reentry point and DI. It does get REAL crunchy in tube mode and there is not much in between clean and gritty. It helps to lower the tube strength to a 5751 (lower gain match to 12ax7) and there are only two tubes for the whole thing so its an easy/cheap swap and you can still have 1 stock tube in there if you like the gritty and the other two channels will be shared on another so no need to buy matched sets. I use the thing all the time as it shines on drums and vocals. Its basically learning what works and what doesn't. There is some definite limitations to the compression and its relationship to the gain stage. Example if your input gain goes past three you will be over compressing...and still not driving the pre. It is helpful with dynamic singers and kick drums on "fast" 100%tube. I definitely like the solid state sound on overheads/snare cause it smoothes them out way too much on tube. I can't wait to see black lions mod on this to the conversion section anyway so call and tell them to hurry because it will no doubt be in a league all its own once them boys are done as there is already nothing like this out there lol.

Great Unit

These preamps sound great. The amount of options with this box make it well your your money. The A/D converters (which sound pretty decent as well) is a great feature too. The only downfall of these pres is that its a bit too easy to drive them into distortion in my opinion, but maybe that's what you're looking for. All in all this is a solid build unit, plenty of options to help you get through a session, and sound awesome, for a fair price point.