Hammock Hill Audio PreQ-2R

With two channels, ample gain, character on tap, and an EQ section thrown in for good measure, there’s plenty to commend this capable preamp.

Many pro‑audio product manufacturers today take their inspiration from the second half of the 20th Century and, while that can be wonderful, I always find it refreshing when I come across someone whose products march to the beat of a different drum. One such company is Hammock Hill Audio, a boutique manufacturer based in Austin, Texas. Owner Indri Schaelicke declares his passion for music proudly, along with a design philosophy of “capturing the full frequency profile of an incoming signal and allowing the user to shape the tonality of the result”. This aims to offer, he says, “unique combinations of features and sound characteristics to provide engineers and artists with new tools that help them turn their creative vision into reality”.

Hammock Hill’s first product, the PreQ22 microphone preamp and EQ, appeared in 2022. A single‑slot, 500‑series unit, it features a discrete op‑amp and output transformer topology, a switchable two‑band sweep EQ, a fully variable high‑pass filter, and a post‑transformer output fader. The PreQ22 was followed by another 500‑series mic preamp called the LOG (short for Lots Of Gain!), which offers up to a chunky 86dB boost, a high‑pass filter, two input impedance choices, and a twin‑tap, air‑gapped output transformer.

Their latest offering, reviewed here, is the PreQ‑2R, and for this Hammock Hill have taken two PreQ22s, added a couple of additional features, and housed the result in a 1U 19‑inch rackmount enclosure. As with all Hammock Hill products, the PreQ22 is designed and hand‑built in Austin, using only full‑size, through‑hole components.

Silvered Star

With a silver‑coloured front panel, and logos that fade horizontally from left to right, the PreQ‑2R is a stylish unit that will stand out in any rack. Its two sets of channel controls are identical, and lie on either side of a small central on/off toggle switch. This effectively acts as a standby switch, as the integrated mains on/off switch and IEC socket with fuse sit on the rear panel, on the opposite end to the balanced audio input and output XLR connectors.

Each channel also features a front‑panel XLR/quarter‑inch (6.25mm) jack combo connector, allowing you to connect a balanced, low‑impedance microphone to the XLR, or to use the jack as a DI input for unbalanced, high‑impedance instruments, such as guitars and keyboards. Inserting a jack plug bypasses the microphone preamplifier, and routes the signal to a JFET‑based preamp. Next to the XLR/jack combination sits a thru (loop out) from the DI input, and this allows you to connect to an external amp, effects unit or other device, or even to feed the output to the PreQ‑2R’s other channel, should you wish to record a parallel instrument track with a different EQ and/or gain profile.

Next to the thru jack sits the switching triumvirate found on virtually every professional‑grade mic preamp in the known...