It’s easy to think of emulation as belonging to the digital world. The Emulator was one of the first successful samplers, and today, plug‑ins emulate everything from microphones to mixing consoles. But there have been many products that used analogue technology to emulate other analogue systems. The Emulator itself was pre‑dated by the Mellotron and the Chamberlin. Flangers replicated an effect first created using tape machines. Even guitar amp simulators were originally analogue devices, such as the Tom Scholz Rockman.
In the last two decades, digital modelling has become so powerful that you might think there wasn’t much mileage left in the idea of analogue emulation. If you can accurately mimic some piece of vintage gear in a few lines of code, why bother developing and building complex analogue circuits to do the same thing?
One reason is that analogue technology has also moved forward, with some of the biggest strides coming in the field of digital control over analogue circuits, allowing them to fit into a digital world where recallability and software control are expected. And while no piece of hardware will ever be as cheap to manufacture as a plug‑in, analogue circuitry still has qualities that can’t easily be replicated in software. As an example, take McDSP’s Analog Processing Box, which uses digital switching and control to configure sophisticated analogue processing. Sonically, it achieves results that simply don’t seem to be possible using software alone.
The same is true of this month’s cover product. Cranborne Audio’s Brick Lane 500 is a poster child for what can be done with cutting‑edge digitally controlled analogue circuitry. Its audio signal path is fully analogue, and uses an innovative implementation of PWM (pulse width modulation) compression to deliver astonishing technical specs — some of which are arguably impossible to match in software. (If you’re sceptical, consider that the Brick Lane’s attack time can go as low as six nanoseconds. That’s at least three orders of magnitude lower than the duration of a single sample, even in a plug‑in that upsamples to 96kHz!)
I’m convinced that digitally controlled analogue is the best of both worlds.
Thanks to its extensive digital control, the Brick Lane 500 can also emulate other styles of compression including opto, FET and even variable‑mu valve circuits. Having spent a lot of time myself with the APB, I’m convinced that digitally controlled analogue is the best of both worlds. It can capture the essential sonic qualities of classic dynamics processors in a way that many feel conventional plug‑ins don’t, but retains all the versatility and controllability of digital. And best of all, on a per‑channel basis, devices like the Brick Lane 500 and APB are actually more affordable than most vintage‑style compressors. The future is hybrid!
Sam Inglis Editor In Chief