Don’t let front of house tell you you can’t crank your live set because it “isn’t mastered.” And don’t let the diminutive size of these modules fool you in the studio, either. Aircraft Designs, a group of young engineers from Ukraine, has built a promising take on signal processing with a series of Eurorack modules coming soon. Meet Processing System:
I’ve been tracking Aircraft Designs ever since the folks in Kyiv pointed me their way. (The module maker is currently based in Poland.) We got a chance to take a look last month at Superbooth and I’m very excited to see these become available. What I heard looked and sounded great, and the design approach is appealing. If they live up to that promise, it won’t be hard to see these becoming a mainstay. You can add this to a studio for a fraction of the cost of most racks of analog processing hardware, and in a way that actually makes sense, thanks to its form factor and processing flexibility.
From Superbooth, checking the prototypes:
And in a live use – well, look, if you’re one of those artists demanding a high fee for your “all-hardware” live set, this could be worth the extra row to get the sound the way you want. Sorry, an absolute bane of my existence is going to a show and listening to a live set sound soft compared to the DJs playing before and after.
And since it’s modular, of course, you can pick and choose. They have a nice range here:
- Horizon: 18HP EQ with “floating gyrators,” inspired by the Pultec EQP-1R.
- Cascade: 18HP VCA compressor, just like the classics.
- Ember: 14HP analog stereo saturator.
- DC power supply.
- FL & LD balanced input and output, 6HP each, utility modules for coming into and out of line level.
Gyrators give you a high-frequency boost without self-noise, basically. (That’s floating as opposed to grounded.) Floating “inductor” is probably a more intuitive description. Someone asked, so … have a TI video on the topic from Bob Pease, inventor of the legendary LM337 IC.
These have some nice design features, from the sensible controls to stereo/mono operation to high-quality metering and bypass switches. And they’re all really low-noise – which (cough) has not always been my experience with Eurorack.
I mean, look, you might just get a compressor and line utility, or even just the power and line utility – there’s an advantage to modules here.
The modules are expected to ship this fall.
https://aircraftdesigns.info/links
A detailed look at Ember:
Here they are, looking pretty:
UkrRack continues to grow: