Essential 500 Series ModulesGuida agli acquisti

The 500 Series is extremely appealing for recording engineers and musicians and a variety of levels for its flexibility, modularity

Recording engineers and musicians looking for super flexible

Looking for the ultimate in flexibility for your studio’s front-end gear and your analog mixdown processors? 500 Series gear lets you pick, mix, and match components to create a setup that’s space-conscious, modular, flexible, configurable, customizable, affordable, and offers you the best of the best in analog sound quality.

It all started with API, who developed a system for mounting compact modules into a tabletop or rackmountable chassis. The modules included mic preamps, compressors, and equalizers. Recording engineers immediately recognized that these handy and affordable modules would make it easy to build simple, compact rigs they could easily take anywhere, so the format quickly caught on. Soon several other manufacturers embraced the 500 Series format and began producing scaled-down versions of classic preamps, EQs, and compressors. Over the years, however, both the number of companies producing 500 Series modules and the variety of processors have expanded dramatically.

The number one benefit to using 500 Series modules is flexibility. You can pick and choose whatever assortment of modules you want: preamps, compressors, EQs, de-essers, re-ampers, direct boxes, and more. They take up far less space than full-size rack gear, and reconfiguring your rig and swapping out modules is easy. Just pull one module, drop in another, and you’re good to go! Having your complete signal flow lined up in a single rack unit also keeps all the controls in one place, which can be a serious improvement to your workflow. And you can fit lots of different processors into a single rack, which makes your diverse collections of tools also very portable. Finally, there’s the cost. Most 500 Series gear is significantly less expensive than the full-sized equivalent, making it far less expensive to craft your ideal signal paths.

Getting into the 500 Series all starts with the chassis (also referred to at times as a rack or lunchbox), which is a powered enclosure that you pack your modules into to connect, protect, and power them. While chassis and racks are designed to be mounted onto larger recording gear racks, a lunchbox features a more portable design with a carrying handle, like its namesake.

Racks come in a variety of different configurations with varying feature sets and capabilities. The first consideration you'll have to make is in regards to space—how many module slots you'll need—with racks generally having anywhere from two to 10 spaces.

Because this is your modules' power supply and primary I/O, you'll also have to consider voltage ratings and connection types—multichannel DB-25 connectors are common, as are discrete balanced ins and outs like XLR and TRS jacks.

More robust 500 Series racks will also feature complex signal routing—like internal patching, audio summing, and stereo linking—so be sure to carefully consider what the chassis offers and what kinds of features will or won't be useful to you.

Modularity is especially exciting when it comes to preamps. Instead of being relegated to whatever your console is already equipped with, engineers can choose to build their setups with one or more modules suited to their tastes and studio needs.

The 500 Series preamp market is full of classic solid-state console recreations, vintage tube designs, and totally modern models featuring entirely new concepts. Whatever kind of preamp you're looking for, it's likely available in the 500 Series format.

There are four main types of compressors: Optical is one of the oldest forms and uses light to trigger gain reduction for a very slow attack time; tube/variable-mu compresses using a vacuum tube with the ratio increasing with input level rather than getting its own control; FET uses a "field effect transistor" to control gain and was developed as a faster alternative to tube designs; and VCA uses a voltage-controlled amplifier to control gain.

All of these kinds of compressors are available in the 500 Series—some in mono, some stereo, and some that are stereo-linkable by way of two single-chain units. Anyone in the market for a 500 Series compressor should also consider the module's side-chain capability.

EQs are an important part of your setup, serving to adjust the loudness of specific frequencies, and come in a variety of different types. You might find a shelf EQ—which offers very basic bass and treble controls—on a consumer hi-fi system while graphic EQs offer more control over each individual frequency band and thus are especially popular when working with monitors and in live sound.

There are also parametric EQs, which allow you to boost/cut specific frequencies while also controlling the width of the bandwidth, and the similar semi-parametric EQs, which work in much the same way except with fixed bandwidths.

Though preamps, compressors, and EQs can color your signal, it's not a given and often not the best place to look if you're after specific effects. The 500 Series market is full of specialty effect modules that can help fill out your signal where you need it or bring something entirely unique to your sound.