The Bunker Studio

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06/06/2025

a couple of near field monitors that have stood the test of time—approaching the half century mark of usability and relevance!

05/23/2025

The humble 74 Junior velocity ribbon microphone
This was a budget ribbon mic from RCA’s mid-20th-century heyday—it was very popular among amateur radio operators and smaller AM stations as an announcement mic, and sold in large numbers
As a result, they’re not too hard to find today—not quite as valuable as the flagship 44BX or 77D/DX (and not quite as hi-fi, either), but a very handy workhorse
it’s a great candidate for putting in the general vicinity of a drum kit and compressing heavily

05/18/2025

Did you ever notice that the logo consists of three illustrations of a cardioid mic pattern, overlapping to form a triquetra (“Celtic knot”) shape?
Similarly, Yamaha’s logo consists of three overlapping tuning forks (they even use this one on motorcycles!)

05/11/2025

The diode bridge compressor has a unique feature that only applies if you have two or more of them—you can link as many as you want for multichannel operation!
the small toggle switch in the lower right of the unit has three positions—“a”, “b”, or “ind”
this links the compressor to one of two buses, or sets it up to operate independently (unlinked)
we have four of these in each of our tracking rooms plus four more in our mix room, so we could theoretically link them quadraphonically (not that we’d ever need to!)
we’ve never tested the limits, but can’t see why it wouldn’t be possible to link all twelve (though the imagination strains for a use case… 7.1.4 bus compressor maybe?)

05/03/2025

These are all vacuum tube compressors, but one is not like the rest
The Teletronix LA-2A has vacuum tube amplifiers, but the gain reduction is done via an optical photocell (an electroluminescent panel is packaged with a photoresistor and shines in proportion to input signal)
the rest use variable-mu tubes (tubes whose amplification is variable in proportion to bias voltage)
all are great!

04/28/2025

The .berlin is still hard to beat, despite having been out of full production for 33 years
A limited-run reissue, built from NOS parts, came and went in a flash recently
We’ve got a few old KM84s and they’re still in very regular use around here—our stable of vintage and modern mics has gotten pretty sizable over the years!

04/24/2025

very fast analog compressor/limiter!
these vintage units are really characterful… they do something none of their “early FET compressor” peers do, exactly
a great color to have within our stable of the usual 1176s and API 525s
We suspect part of the character might lie within the large Triad input and output transformers, which certainly do have a sound

04/16/2025

.berlin have been making the most important part of the uninterrupted for many decades—the capsule
For this reissue, they had to reproduce some of the parts, and find a suitable replacement for the extinct vacuum tube
Despite their reputation, vacuum tubes are actually quite linear devices on their own—as long as operated within their normal parameters
Much of the “sound” associated with tubes is actually down to the transformers that are usually needed to transform their impedances, but we digress…
Suffice to say, the substitute tube was very intelligently-chosen and doesn’t actually make a whole lot of difference (or any difference, to our ears) to the sound of the reissue
If they didn’t sound like M49s, we wouldn’t have bought five of them. really did a fantastic job on these!

04/12/2025

When was making their famed desks half a century ago, nobody expected they’d still be the gold standard of large-format analog recording consoles in 2025
The reason isn’t functionality, flexibility or reliability—the only reason is the sound
The most important part is the input modules—31102s in the case of our desk (though the earlier 1081, 1073, 1066 and 1084—in no particular order—were equally-great)

04/07/2025

two very similar old government-issue limiters
the Federal is a descendant of the old Signal Corps limiter on the bottom
The Signal Corps unit has very large steel-core transformers for full-bandwidth, and sounds really good—we’ve had it for nearly twenty years!

03/30/2025

when recording acoustic instruments, the sound of the room is secondary in importance only to the player and the instrument
we have several distinct-sounding rooms (large, medium and small) and can further tailor h to our environments with and positioning

03/18/2025

Our vintage was refurbished by the late Oliver Archut, who optimized it for use with a special vacuum tube that differs from its stock configuration
As any microphone enthusiast already knows, the U47 was designed around a very rare vacuum tube called the VF14. Old-stock VF14s have, for all practical purposes, all been used up
Compounding matters further, the U47 actually used a specially-selected “microphone grade” VF14 dubbed the VF14M
The “M” spec tubes where the lowest-noise examples, and as rare as a VF14 is, the “M” specification is even rarer
Even twenty years ago, single examples were retailing in the four figures… when you could find them! Now the situation is even more dire
The discontinuation of the VF14 is why .berlin stopped making the U47 in the first place—and we suspect why there has been no reissue as of yet (their reissues tend to be very faithful to the genuine article)
Neumann service bulletins detailed the substitution of the 13CW4 Nuvistor, a different type of tube that worked okay (but wasn’t a perfect match for the BV08 transformer in the U47). Still, many of the Nuvistor-equipped mics sound just fine
Ours came to us in this state; Oliver swapped in a different tube that he insisted was a better substitute; a bit more like the VF14 in performance
We love the sound of the mic and never questioned it!

Address

New York, NY

Telephone

+19292348534

Website

http://www.thebunkerstudio.com/

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