Le Liquid channel toujours dans la course?

Quand c'est bon, c'est bon...Le Liquid Channel est toujours dans le coup. LA même technologie (sans la compression et l'eq) est utilisée dans les Liquid 4 Channel

The original Liquid Channel's preamp stage was the first of its kind and extraordinarily complex. It involved a lot of sophisticated switching of inductors, capacitors, resistors and even a transformer, to radically alter the impedance and other electrical characteristics of the input stage. The aim was to change the input stage so that, from the microphone's point of view, the input circuitry appeared to be exactly the same as the actual preamp being emulated. The reason is that the performance of most microphones is affected in significant ways by the characteristics of the input it is feeding, and this interaction is a vital part of any preamp's sound character. Furthermore, this interaction cannot be emulated easily using convolution — it has to be at electronic component level in the analogue front end!

One problem when designing a multi-channel version is that this preamp circuit's complexity meant it took up a lot of space — almost half the available floor area of the Liquid Channel's rack-mounting case. So getting four of these analogue sections into a 2U case would have been very difficult, not to mention extremely expensive. Fortunately, technology moves on, and the Focusrite boffins have spent the last three years locked away in darkened rooms trying to find a way of reducing the size and complexity of the preamp circuitry without changing the fundamental way in which it works, its flexibility or, most importantly, its performance.

The launch of the Liquid 4 Pre is the evidence that they have achieved their goal, and a squint inside the box reveals a far more compact (but still very busy and complex) pair of circuit boards, one mounted above the other. The most obvious circuit change is that the large transformer used in the Liquid Channel has been omitted from the Liquid 4 Pre's input stages completely. However, its influence on the circuit characteristics is still provided by smaller, cheaper components, including bespoke inductors.