Rupert Neve Designs has announced the 5025 Dual Shelford Mic Pre, a limited edition 2-channel microphone preamplifier based on the company’s Shelford Channel, with production limited to just 300 units.
“The Shelford Channel is the definitive evolution of the original technologies found in Rupert’s classic modules like the 1073, 1064 and 2254, advanced and refined for the modern engineer,” says the Rupert Neve Designs. “The Dual Shelford offers the sonic excellence of two Shelford mic preamps in a single rack space – simply put, these are two channels of the finest microphone preamplification in the world.”
The Dual Shelford Mic Pre utilizes custom step-up transformers on the microphone inputs that provide the first 15 dB of gain. “While the majority of the harmonic richness found in Rupert’s designs is a product of the output transformer and surrounding class-A amplifiers, this custom step-up input transformer also imparts a unique musical enhancement of its own,” the company. According to the company, this is primarily a result of its reactive impedance characteristic and how that interacts with the connected microphone, “resulting in subtle, non-linear harmonic enhancement of the lows and an unmistakable sweetness in the high frequencies.”
The Dual Shelford Mic Pre also offers a stated 72 dB of low-noise class-A gain, a sweepable high-pass filter, the company’s Silk Red and Blue circuit for two flavors of customizable harmonic saturation, and the dual output level transformers originally developed for the Shelford Channel. The -6 dB output from these custom transformers “allows the engineer to hit the ‘sweet spot’ of the output stage more easily, adding rich harmonic character without clipping the next device in the chain.”
