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Dizengoff Audio recreate RCA tube mic pre

Chicago company make BA-2C inspired mic pre for under €1000

Dizengoff Audio is the brain-child of Matt Newport, a Chicago native who also founded and ran Black Lion Audio until 2012. With Dizengoff, the emphasis is on building affordable tributes to classic recording gear based on the original circuitry, but with a Chicago-inspired twist.

With his latest design, the DA2, Newport has revisited the classic RCA BA-2C tube microphone preamp and is selling it for under €1000 including taxes. With the preamp being a tube and transformer-based design, you might expect that the sound would be rather coloured. According to Newport, this is not the case when recording at lower levels, saying it is very clean and transparent. Apparently, this is not the case when levels get a but hotter, explains Newport “the way the output transformer saturates adds a girth in the low end.”

Matt Newport is really keen on keeping manufacturing as close to his home as possible, working with a Chicago-based former Western Electric engineer to make his transformers, and another Chicago company to manufacture the chunky Bakelite gain knob.

To find out more about the company and about the DA2 itself, check out the video above, and to hear it in action, head over to the Dizengoff website where they have a series of audio examples.

http://www.dizengoffaudio.com/

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