There’s no shortage of console emulations available to us these days. Neve, API, SSL and Trident have all been modeled to death, and most of us have a favorite we reach for when a track needs some attitude. But one desk responsible for a load of records you know by heart almost never comes up, mostly because only 14 of them were ever built. That console is the Sound Techniques A-Range, and it’s now been recreated as the Sound Techniques Alpha Range Channel from Korneff Audio.
A little history first. Geoff Frost and John Wood founded Sound Techniques studio in Chelsea, London in late 1964, and the first A-Range console was built and installed there the following year.
Only 14 were hand-built between 1965 and 1971, landing at Trident and De Lane Lea in London, and at Sunset Sound and Elektra Sound Recorders here in Los Angeles.
The Sunset Sound desk arrived in April of 1967 and was the first British-designed console ever sold in the United States, which tells you how badly people wanted it.
The Preamp And EQ
The heart of the plugin is the preamp, which was a one-off design that saturates in a way that adds size and sparkle instead of grit. Along with the expected Mic Preamp Gain, you get an Input Transformer Impedance control that loads the transformer differently for tone, plus Mic/Line and Polarity switches.
The EQ is two bands of inductor-based equalization, and it’s a little strange in the best possible way. The high band is sweepable with a wide, medium or narrow bandwidth selector, and it lets you boost and cut at the same time.
That’s the old Pultec trick applied to the top end, so you get air without the harshness that usually comes with it. The low band switches between 80 and 150Hz for either big bottom end or low mid warmth, and there are high and low pass filters as well.
The Compressor And Summing Bus
The original console never had a compressor, so Korneff added one called the ElektraComp, a vintage VCA design with an Easy mode that gives you only Threshold and Blend knobs already set up for parallel processing. Switch Easy off and the full parameter set opens up along with a visualizer, and there’s stereo linking if you need it.
There’s also a summing bus emulation that colors multiple instances of the plugin the way the console’s bus amps did, plus a back panel where you can tweak the individual amplifier stages, the transformers, and CPU usage.
The Sound Techniques Alpha Range Channel normally sells for $129.99 but currently has an introductory price of $64.99. It runs on Mac, Windows and Linux in VST3, AU, AAX and LV2 formats, and there’s a free demo available. You can find out more here, or watch the video below for more details.
