STUDIO ESSENTIALS : January 2001
STUDIO ESSENTIALS Little Lanilei Rotary Wave Speaker Published in SOS January 2001  Printer-friendly versionReviews : Accessory Little Lanilei Rotary Wave Speaker
Inside the unit is an upward-facing 35W driver around five inches in diameter firing into a lightweight, rotating baffle which deflects the sound outwards through grille apertures on all four sides of the vinyl-covered cabinet. Full marks for ingenuity here, as the polystyrene rotor is actually fixed to a wooden disc, which is in turn stuck to the face of a DC-drive equipment cooling fan. The wire-wound speed-control pot varies the motor current, and hence the speed. An integral switch provides an 'off' position while a jack socket allows the included footswitch to be used to change the speed between fast and slow. A Start button on the front panel kick starts the motor if it should stall when the speed is set very low. A quarter-inch jack socket is used to feed from your external amplifier to the speaker, while power for the baffle motor comes from an included wall-wart power supply. As the Little Lanilei has no rotary horn, the sound is less bright and less complex than you'd expect from a full-size rotary speaker, and, because of the modest size of the driver, it tends to be a bit mid-heavy. Admittedly you can reduce this boxiness by EQ'ing the Little Lanilei's audio feed, and the subjective sound is certainly smooth and musical. You can vary the sound depending on how you mic it up and, although close miking will pick up a little wind noise from the rotor, this is pleasingly 'vintage' and not unduly intrusive. The speed-change aspect is less successful, though, as the baffle drum takes a long time to slow down due to the lack of any kind of active breaking system. The speed-up time is somewhat better, but you can't really 'play' the speed control as a good organist would do with a Leslie. Nevertheless, the end result is definitely organic and works wonderfully well with guitar or keyboard. The Little Lanilei isn't a direct replacement for a Leslie speaker, but it does provide the means to add a nicely subtle rotary speaker effect to any instrument or voice. On the plus side is portability and subtlety of tone, while the weaknesses are the long slow-down time and the somewhat mid-heavy tone -- the former is perhaps the harder to forgive at this price. For recording, the unit offers something that digital emulations still can't quite match and, provided that you work within its limitations, you can coax some really nice sounds out of it. Paul White
Tech 21 Sansamp Acoustic DI
Housed in the familiar black die-cast case, the Sansamp Acoustic DI can be powered from a 9V battery or from phantom power arriving at the XLR output. There are two high-impedance input jacks available, the first of which, labelled Input, will usually feed both the jack and XLR outputs through the sound-shaping circuitry. However, if a jack is inserted into the second input, labelled Input To XLR, the buffered signal from the second jack will be fed directly to the XLR output, while the processed signal from the first input will only feed the unbalanced output. This configuration allows an insert point to be implemented between the unbalanced output and the Input To XLR input if required. The Active switch functions as a bypass, though the unit still acts as an active buffer in bypass mode. The Phantom & Ground Connect switch makes the unit ready to accept external phantom power in one position, while acting as a ground lift in the other. A 20dB output pad is also available for use with console mic preamps. The circuitry of this box is all analogue and includes a section that purports to model the effects of a tube microphone. This applies soft limiting to the signal peaks and also rounds out the sound to some extent -- there's no way to adjust the degree of compression or saturation, but the Blend control adjusts the mix of original sound and 'mic-modelled' sound to taste. The EQ section has Bass and Treble controls with a ±12dB range, while the Mid control can be swept between 170Hz and 3.5kHz with ±16dB gain available. Level adjusts the output gain, and a red LED shows when the unit is active. Compared against the unprocessed sound of the pickup on my acoustic guitar, the Acoustic DI dramatically changed the tone, removing much of the boxiness of the original signal, though a certain amount of careful setting up was needed to get the best results -- in particular, I found that moving the Blend control too far towards the mic-modelling position resulted in a rather dull sound. However, with a little Mid control cut and some fine tuning of the Bass and Treble controls, I soon arrived at a setting that was a close approximation to the acoustic sound of the guitar -- full without being boxy and clear at the high end without becoming too scratchy. I've never yet recorded directly from my acoustic guitar, but having heard the results that can be achieved going via the Tech 21 Sansamp Acoustic DI, I'd be more than willing to give it a try. Paul White
Published in SOS January 2001 | Thursday 28th August 2008 September 2008
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