Drawmer 1979

Drawmer’s latest processor packs a lot of punch into a 1U rack!

We’ve already found plenty to love in Drawmer’s 1970s range, and the latest to arrive for review is their 1979, a 1U 19‑inch rackmount analogue channel strip that, like all their gear, is made in Yorkshire, England. Essentially, the 1979 combines a particularly versatile mic/line/instrument preamp stage with a three‑band EQ, a FET compressor and overall output mix and level control. I’ll take you through the details of all that below, but first I should mention that I looked at a similar but larger, more richly featured channel strip in SOS June 2024: Drawmer’s 1977.

The most significant differences between the two, other than size, are that the 1979 has dropped the variable frequency option for the preamp’s filter, along with several of the more advanced features in the EQ and compressor (for instance, the slope switches for the shelves, the Big and Air circuits and independent make‑up gain stage for the compressor, and the dedicated saturation facility). All that is, of course, reflected in the price, the ‘street price’ being about £350$600 less for the 1979 than the 1977. But the 1979 also has an interesting card up its preamp sleeve that the 1977 lacks. More on that below.

Connections & Controls

On the rear are four Neutrik jacks: one for the balanced mic input, one a dedicated balanced line input, a direct out (taken post the preamp and filters, but pre the EQ/compressor), and a main output. There’s also a TRS jack for the unbalanced insert point, while a fused IEC14 inlet (for 50‑60 Hz, 115‑230 V mains AC) is joined by an on/off rocker switch.

Insert even the cheapest of cheap EQs into the side‑chain, and you can shape the compressor’s response to your heart’s content.

There are some design decisions here that I approve of. First, this I/O configuration makes it easy to put the mic and line inputs on separate patchbays, and prevent phantom power being applied accidentally to line‑level gear. Second, the direct out makes it possible to record using the traditional in‑line approach: the mic signal going straight to ‘tape’, and the DAW playing back through the line input for mixing. Third, insert even the cheapest EQ into the side‑chain, and you can shape the compressor’s response to your heart’s content, and, with a suitable cable, you can use the return stage as a key input.

With separate line and mic inputs on the rear (there’s an instrument input on the front too), a direct out and a side‑chain insert point, as well as the main output, the 1979 has been designed to play nicely with a patchbay.

Lift Off

Your signal enters at the preamp stage, whose control section hosts an array of switches. First, a rotary switch selects both the source and the mic input impedance: you can choose the front‑panel TS instrument input, the line input, or the mic input. For the last, there are several settings: three different input impedance options that could help you coax different voicings out of passive dynamic mics, including ribbons (150Ω, 600Ω or 2.4kΩ); and Mic 48V, which presents a higher impedance and engages 48V phantom power for capacitor and other active mics and DIs. There’s also a polarity inverter, which is always good to see.

Then we come to the input gain, another rotary switch, and this one has a crowd of labels jostling for your attention: an inner circle describes the mic preamp’s 0‑66 dB range, while an outer ring running from ‑24 to +42 dB is for the line input. Despite the density of the text, it’s all pretty easy to read, with clear white‑on‑black printing, and reverse colours for the outer ring. Two more buttons combine to set the first‑order high‑pass filter (30, 80 or 110 Hz, or off). Finally, a red button engages a function called Lift. Drawmer say this adjusts the gain of lower‑level signals to make it easy to work with quiet sources without the clipping that simply applying gain risks, or damaging the peaks as can happen with conventional compression/limiting. They don’t give the game away, but I suspect it’s a form of preset parallel compressor. As I’ll explain later, it works remarkably well.

On the opposite side, there’s a main output section. A balanced master bypass button routes the preamp stage directly to the main output — it doesn’t even pass through the main ‑10 to +20 dB output level control that’s also found here, along with an output‑level VU meter (which has a +10dB pad switch to make its readings more helpful when deliberately working with hot signals). A wet/dry pot blends the preamp’s output (dry) with that post the EQ and compressor (wet). And there’s a power‑present LED, but sadly no front‑panel on/off switch.

EQ & Compressor

The EQ, which can be switched in/out of the signal path independently of the compressor, comprises low and high shelf filters, and one swept‑mid/semi‑parametric band that has switchable bandwidth (narrow or wide, the latter indicated by a green LED). All three bands offer ±12dB of gain, and they’re connected in series, with helpful overload indicator LEDs between each stage. Helpfully, the Cut/Boost knobs are all detented at the unity gain position.

The low shelf is first in the signal path, and can be set from 50 to 700 Hz, with various settings clearly marked in between. The mid comes next, and despite the name spans a vast range (75Hz to 10kHz). The high shelf has a similarly generous range of 1.25 to 12 kHz. There’s plenty of overlap between bands, then, and while this could make precision matching of multiple units tricky, yellow pointers at the base of each knob do make the position pretty clear. Above a button (with green LED) to engage the EQ section or enact a hard bypass, there’s another to place it pre/post the compressor.

The compressor uses a FET to perform gain reduction, and again has an in/bypass button (red LED for in). In its eight‑LED, 0 to ‑20 dB gain‑reduction meter, the top five LEDs cover the first 7dB, so there’s plenty of resolution where you want it. The main controls are all rotary pots — no detents this time, but they’re not really needed here. These govern the conventional compressor parameters: threshold (±20dB); ratio (1.5:1 right up to 20:1); attack (0.2 to 200 milliseconds); and release (0.1 to 2.5 seconds).

There’s no dedicated blend control for the compressor; you use the master wet/dry knob for parallel compression. There’s a good reason to configure it this way: you can EQ the compressed signal, to target the energy you add to the dry signal. The flip side is that if you first use EQ to set the desired tone and then decide you wish to apply parallel compression, you’ll need to revisit your EQ. So if you know you’ll want to parallel compress with pre‑compression EQ, you might be better off setting the compressor and mix controls first, and then EQ’ing into them.

In Use

Having reviewed the 1977 already I was pretty confident about what this new unit would offer, and my expectations weren’t wide of the mark. The preamp doesn’t impose huge character on signals, but rather conveys them cleanly and with a good sense of detail — as you want from a good all‑rounder. The HPF is less fine‑tunable than on the 1977, but with the three frequency options there’s still ample scope to tackle pops and rumbles, or, for example, to move a guitar’s low end out of the way of a bass. And if not using the compressor, that mix control could be used as a way to scale your EQ settings. The impedance options were interesting to play with. I found lower settings could coax a more midrange‑y sound out of an SM57 placed on a guitar cabinet, for example.

The Lift button is more useful than I’d anticipated. Yes, it makes quieter sounds louder, and that could be helpful for stage and streaming or broadcast sound. But it can also do a wonderful job of bringing up any breathiness in a vocal, or emphasising whispers for an intimate sound. Hearing that in your headphones, with zero latency, can really help the performance too. So there are studio applications for Lift too.

I have little to say about the EQ, but that’s not an insult! It’s a classic console‑style EQ: pretty much neutral in terms of character, and with plenty of range and gain on hand for tone‑shaping of pretty much any source. There isn’t the ability to get really surgical, but it’s worth pointing out that the broad ranges mean you can place a mid dip below where you’ve set a low shelf boost, to tighten that boost. Similarly you can boost the high end, while countering any harshness that results.

Finally, there’s the compressor, and that isn’t so neutral sounding. There’s a distinctive FET character, particularly with more aggressive settings, but the colour isn’t excessive, and with gentler settings it’s suitable for massaging all sorts of material. Used on its own, without the EQ, the mix knob makes it trivially easy to dial in parallel compression. My only misgiving is the one I raised earlier, that using the mix knob can also dilute your EQ moves. But while that might influence your workflow, it doesn’t really prevent you from doing what’s needed.

This is a channel strip that should find a home in plenty of live rigs, and could prove a good front end in any project studio.

I like Drawmer’s kit. It’s all honest, no‑nonsense stuff that performs well, but they also focus on delivering thoughtful extras, such as the Lift facility here. This is a channel strip that should find a home in plenty of live rigs, and could prove a good front end in any project studio.