Guitar Center review: Presonus ISA One Preamp
Presonus ISA One Preamp
I’ve been doing voice acting through a nice Neumann TLM103 microphone plugged into a typical off-the-shelf $100 USB audio interface for years and it’s always sounded just fine to me. My relationship with Guitar Center allows me to take home gear to try it out from time to time, so I recently took home a Presonus ISA One preamp to record a few auditions for some commercials. After about 48 hours I realized it was something I had to add to my arsenal.
The ISA One has many bells and whistles, buttons and knobs, inputs and outputs. I was too excited to read the manual so I just plugged in my mic, turned on the phantom power and hit record. As soon as I hit the playback I could hear an immediate improvement in my voice quality. I could swear that I could almost hear each individual flap of my vocal chords vibrating and I could even hear the character of the actual plate inside the mic capsule – it’s that clean of a sound!
Ever plug a mic or instrument into an interface, crank the gain and still have a low signal recorded to your workstation and realize you’ve also cranked it so much you’ve added a ton of noise? That’ll never happen here! The ISA One allows you to select input levels for either microphone, level or instrument level devices. Then you have two level controls – the first sets up a relative amount of input gain (switchable from 0dB to 30dB or from 30db to 60dB), then a second gain knob that allows you an additional 20dB of gain control to be applied to that incoming signal.
The ISA One has a variable impedance selector with four settings: Low, ISA110, Med and High. Without getting into physics, let’s just say that lower impedance settings lower the levels but emphasize the lows and mids while higher impedance raises the volume, flattens the lows and mids, and improves the high frequency response of a microphone.
The ISA has many other features that make it a great tool for pros as well as amateurs: phase reverse, high pass filter, an insert for adding another device into your signal path, headphone jack, VU metering and digital metering with six LEDs for more accurate feedback from the signal, built-in DI and an amp input (also with variable impedance.) There are no unbalanced connections and there’s an optional digital card you can purchase that will give you 9-pin AES/EBU input, optical S/PDIF and optical ADAT, and word clock in and out to sync with your DAW.
It really is a great preamp and at $450-$500 you are getting a very professional device at a budget price. If you’ve got a $3000 guitar being recorded through a $99 USB interface, you’re really missing out on the magic of your gear. Time to save up for something that will take your home recording to the next level.
-Toby is in an intimate relationship with Guitar Center Englewood. Listen to Toby’s voice demos with the ISA One preamp at soundcloud.com/TheVoiceOfToby
Category: Product Reviews
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