Neumann have just announced their return to the preamp market, in the form of the two-channel V402. They’ve not issued a full press release yet, but Neumann have kindly given us a look at their introductory video.
From the front-panel legending, it looks like the V402 can dish out up to 60dB of gain to mic sources, and each of its channels can also accept line and high-impedance (instrument) signals via a front-panel jack socket. Phantom power is catered for, of course, as are polarity inversion, a 60Hz high-pass filter, and a -20dB pad. A 10-segment LED ladder lets you keep an eye on levels.
Over on the right-hand side are what look like some interesting monitoring options. There’s a headphone output with volume knob, and each channel also has its own headphone send control, allowing for analogue, latency-free foldback.
Until we get the full specs we can only speculate about what goes on inside, or the presence of valves and transformers, but one final clue comes from the text at the end of their reveal video: “Discover the true voice of your microphones” hints at clean gain, rather than saturation and 'warmth'. We'll post the introductory video here as soon as it's made public.
