Clean gain isn’t exactly a problem for us these days, so we often look to dedicated preamps more for their tonal character and ease of control. The new 1588 offers both.

New company British Audio Technologies (BAT) are, as you’d expect, based in the UK, and they are just one string to recording and technical engineer Matt Sartori’s bow. In fact, this isn’t our first encounter with Matt’s work: he’s the brains behind the Periscope mic we reviewed in SOS February 2021 (https://sosm.ag/scope-labs-periscope), a design that’s as distinctive as it looks, since as well as the mic itself there’s an aggressive‑sounding compressor built in.

Matt has also been a friendly face at some of the UK’s leading pro‑audio repair services for over 20 years, as well as looking after the technical and service needs of several commercial studios on both sides of the Atlantic. Like many boutique designers, he explains that he tends to develop his products when he feels he needs something that other people haven’t quite managed to offer.

It’s an approach that leads us neatly to this review: Matt tells me that he has long been a fan of a particular 1960s solid‑state preamp made by Altec, and that this project came about because he was keen to have one to hand in a convenient, reliable format, to take with him to different studios or use for location recordings. So it comes as no surprise that he chose to build this new preamp as a 500‑series module. It’s priced in line with the top end of preamps in this format, but is intended to deliver more than gain alone — it promises us the unique sonic properties of a classic but perhaps lesser‑known vintage studio tool. So let’s find out if it delivers the goods...

From Muse To Modernity

The Altec 1588C was introduced in the 1960s as a compact, modular ‘octal’ preamp — meaning it used the same eight‑pin base as some of the valve‑based modules that preceded it. This was a period in audio electronics that saw rapid change, with many designers and engineers moving away from the more complicated tube‑based products, in favour of solid‑state, transistor‑based designs. At the time, the 1588C was respected as a good, practical option, but in the years that followed it came to be recognised as a device whose transformer‑coupled input stage could impart a pleasing character and, when deliberately driven, could take on the role of a saturating, tone‑shaping device where that was desirable.

The 1588C had its pros, then, but its core circuitry was relatively simple — the design features no op‑amps or ICs in the signal path — and it was never really conceived as a fully featured preamp. The original modules offered only a modest 34dB of gain, and they were very much intended to be part of a wider recording chain. Of course, those modules are now very old, too. So from the point of view of today’s...