Reviews of music production equipment and electronic instruments?

[narx]

There was recently a trainwreck of a thread at Gearspace (previously Gearslutz) about sending music production equipment to Amir.

It got me wondering what the appetite here is for this kind of stuff. There are a handful of "Pro Audio" oriented pieces of gear that have been measured here (mostly small interfaces). Would there be an interest in more. For example...

Analog compressors and equalizers?
Guitar amplifiers?
Mastering consoles and monitor controllers?
Patch bays?
Larger interfaces and multichannel converters?
Microphones or mic preamps?
Plugins?
Hardware synthesizers and samplers?

Also, I have an RME Fireface UFX that I bought secondhand with a Black Lion Audio mod. It might be a challenge to schedule, but I'd be interested in sending it to Amir if he could also get ahold of an unmodded unit to compare it to. Would there be an interest in this or other mods, perhaps on more current gear? Black Lion and Revive audio do quite a bit of business doing this and there's little to no objective data about what they're up to.

ASR has become quite a resource in terms of playback devices but there's a huge market for production equipment. Is that an avenue there's an appetite to expand into?

Thanks (by the way) to the community and especially Amir for the great resource here.

 

[ZööZ]

https://www.audiosciencereview.com/...-revolution-2x2-review-audio-interface.22141/
there are some anecdotes on black lion mods in this thread.

 

[RayDunzl]

Anybody with a decent "interface" - ADC to USB is common these days - should be in a position to take a look at the other gear they or a friend has.

I have a Focusrite Clarett 4 pre. It would seem that its "no signal" baseline is in the range of "good enough" for measurement of "pro gear", which would tend not to have a noise floor lower than that which will be taking the measure...

Of course, you can always send something in and wait and see what happens.

 

[RayDunzl]

Then there are 2 general classes of music production gear.

1) Those that amplify or attenuate or mix or otherwise pass-through a signal, and should do so without degrading the signal.

2) Those whose purpose is to change the signal - add, delete, or synthesize harmonics, noise, modulation, echo, reverberation, delay, etc. Those might be interesting to look at, but may be more amenable to test by ear or taste.

I suppose monitor speaker testing would be the closest thing to what is already going on here.

Again, make a reservation, send some in and get in line.

 

[narx]

https://www.audiosciencereview.com/...-revolution-2x2-review-audio-interface.22141/
there are some anecdotes on black lion mods in this thread.

Yeah - no shortage of anecdotes on black lion mods on the internet. My long-ago experience with the Digi002 mods they built their initial reputation on was subjectively good enough that I went for a modded unit when I got the secondhand UFX, and it's been nothing but a pleasure to use.

But I imagine many people would find it interesting to see something more than anecdotes using the kind of testing Amir does here. It doesn't especially matter to me - the unit is more than adequate in practical use - but I'd be willing to try to find a window of time I could be without it if someone had an unmodded unit to compare it to, provided Amir was willing to do it.

Ray, I appreciate the advice to just send stuff in, but that's not really what's behind the question. I think it would be a benefit to the world to see some objective analysis of a BLA mod, but it wouldn't change anything for me personally. I don't think I have anything else that would be worth measuring - I know some of it would measure terribly but sounds great as a creative tool. Several posters in that GS thread were quite certain that this kind of gear would be well worth sending in here, so I’m wondering what the community here thinks.

As I said, the GS thread just got me wondering whether this stuff fits into ASR's scope, whether Amir would be willing to test it, and what kinds of testing might be relevant to the second category you mentioned. Apologies if this is an inappropriate forum to be asking the question.