Audient Mico Review Part One
By Rob Sandall
| Posted in Music Technology, Review
Mico caused a considerable stir when it arrived in the office, partly because of the well-known quality of the preamp components inside, but mainly because of the price of those components.
Yes, the Audient Mico is essentially a highly affordable twin-mic preamp, which uses the same Class A front end as the much-loved ASP008 and ASP8024. Even if you haven’t used these formidable products before, a quick Google will reveal the words ‘transparency’ and ‘detail’ and ‘depth’ a hundred times over – they’re a well respected setup and they’re most certainly used and endorsed by professional engineers and producers.
A good start, then, but one that’s then bolstered by the addition of another revered Audient feature, this time borrowed from the Black preamp. The HMX harmonic sculpting function sounds a little bit poncey, but in effect allows you to run the gamut of vintage through to modern sounds on your mic by turning just the one knob. That’s not to say that you can’t opt for a more simple transparency – you can – but without getting too gimmicky Audient rightly believes that a lot of producers out there do like a little character to their sound, and dialling it in quickly is a tempting offer. We’ll have to see how that fares.
There are two channels, as we’ve said one packing this sculpting feature, and the other with a nifty Variphase phase shift, which you can move from O-18Oo. Effectively then, you can either line everything up in perfect precision, or if you’re a little bit Zappa when it comes to production, put the two channels on the wonk for the out-of-phase sounds.
The shell housing the technology is pretty darn impressive in its own right. Relatively inexpensive it may be, but it certainly doesn’t show to look at it – it’s a light chassis, but one that’s been machined for resilient strength. The controls, too, all click and rotate firmly without putting up a fight, so you know what you’re pressed and what parameters you’re set to without any hesitance.
Speaking of controls, around the front you’ve got a 500kOhms DI input (switched-in phantom power as you need), and then mic/line combi inputs on the back panel too and an XLR line output.
Then you have a phase invert switch (which still works in conjunction with Variphase, yes), switchable hi-lass filters on 40, 80 and 120 and a -20db pad.
It’s a comprehensive-sounding little gem, then, so we’ll have to wait and see exactly how it fares. The preamps are certainly already vouched for, but it’s more a case of how the whole package comes together, so pop along to the mag tomorrow and we’ll take a further look.
Tags: audient mico