Microphone Preamplifier

Preamps / Channel Strips

Published June 2025

Soyuz’s first rackmount preamp evokes the sound of vintage designs.

Soyuz, who started out as a joint American‑Russian venture, have been turning heads for several years now with their original, stylish‑looking, hand‑built microphones that draw on the best traditions of German and Russian designs. The product I’m reviewing here is their first ‘full‑blown’ non‑mic product: while they’ve previously offered the Launcher range of inline booster preamps, the new Lakeside is a fully featured, single‑channel, Class‑A rackmountable mic preamp. Why make a preamp? Soyuz explained that after being continually asked by customers for recommendations as to which preamps would work best with their mics, they figured that they should probably build their own!

I’ve had the pleasure of reviewing a couple of Soyuz mics in recent years, and they’ve always impressed from an aesthetic point of view, with a pleasing amount of care and attention given to the way their products are presented. More importantly, they always sound great. And it’s this combination of factors that has seen Soyuz gain a firm foothold in the high‑end microphone market. The Lakeside certainly stands out visually, but with so many new and established preamp options on the market, I was genuinely intrigued to hear what, if anything, the Lakeside might offer from a sonic perspective to justify what is a substantial outlay for a non‑vintage, single‑channel device.

Features

The Soyuz Lakeside is an all‑discrete, single‑channel, Class‑A preamp, in which large (and very heavy!) custom transformers balance the audio input and output. Although intended primarily to bring out the best in their own mics, it’s not intended to sound clinical, and Soyuz claim that the Lakeside will add a lush, pleasing character and dimension to any microphone, instrument or source.

Inside, you can see the chunky input and output transformers and the high‑pass filter’s inductor, which combine with the gain cotnrol to make this preamp so tonally versatile.

Control‑wise, the Lakeside features a stepped input control that offers up to 60dB of gain in 5dB increments, as well as a variable output trim control that allows the user to add more level going out of the device, or to pull the level down when driving the input stage harder — which is a key intention of the design. We also have the typical controls you’d expect to find on most mic preamps, including polarity inversion and 48V phantom power, and there’s a very welcome DI instrument input on the front of the unit. In the spirit of high‑end vintage preamps, there’s absolutely no metering whatsoever on the Lakeside: it is very much intended as a device whose sound should be set up and judged using just a few luxurious‑feeling controls and your listening skills.

On the back, as is so often the case on vintage‑style preamps, there’s little to see: just an IEC power inlet that can be switched for different territories’ mains voltages, and two Neutrik XLRs to cater for the audio input and output.

The mic input and line output are on rear‑panel XLRs.

What I haven’t mentioned yet is Soyuz’s decision to put a variable high‑pass filter front and centre in their design — it’s the knob with the bright yellow cap — and this gives you a clue as to how important they consider it to be. Soyuz explain that it’s a “unique, inductor based high‑pass filter” that’s designed to be a creative addition, as well as allowing you to perform the more mundane tasks for which a switchable filter is so often included on preamps, such as removing unwanted low‑end rumble or correcting any proximity effect bass boost. High‑quality analogue filters can be creative musical tools not just because of their turnover frequency, but also due to the resonant ‘bumps’ that often sit just above where you set the filter. As with the metering, the markings are deliberately vague so as to encourage you to listen: the 5dB steps are only briefly marked between a range that extends right up to 330Hz. I’ve always been an advocate of using filters when tracking, and I was excited to see if this section lived up to its billing.

In Use

My first encounter with this retro‑looking unit was on a hectic tracking session, with a band who were on a mission to get a track down sharpish. For the live drum‑kit recording, I used the Lakeside to amplify a Shure SM57 close‑snare mic. Typically, I use an API preamp for this job, and I was immediately struck by a sense that the Lakeside was delivering a little more ‘presence’. Also well worth noting is that, using the Lakeside on such a loud source as this, I noticed straight away that this is a preamp that will add a nice, saturated character when required — it’s clearly not intended to be a linear, reference device! A quick peek at the waveforms of the recorded snare drum revealed just how firmly the high transients are controlled by the Lakeside’s sizeable transformers. Exploring this feature in search of more subtle effects, I could discern a lovely sense of saturation that added a touch of richness and excitement, but if you desire more obvious distortion you can easily head into that territory too. In more subjective terms, I’d say that to my ears it sounded much more akin to vintage Neve‑style distortion than the op‑amp‑influenced character of API’s classic designs.

With the drum tracking done, the bassist was keen to work on his bass parts — so I tried plugging him straight into the instrument input on the front panel, and he got straight to work. Again, I could hear that midrange presence that I’d noticed on the snare, and later, when mixing, I noticed that I wasn’t looking to boost around 1‑2 kHz to make the bass more audible, as I so often need to. These bass recordings also led me for the first time to notice that the bottom end had a nicely ‘contained’ feel that, on certain sources such as vocals, I found could tip the sound into feeling a bit harsh if the input was a little too hot. This was just one of the many nuances that I noticed when balancing the Lakeside’s gain and output controls, and I remained intrigued as I tried to learn and predict the subtle but noticeable way in which the input level affected the tone.

Recording electric and acoustic guitars provided a good opportunity to get more of a feel for the inductor‑based filter section, and it felt smooth and natural to experiment with just how far you could roll the filter up before a guitar sound began to lose its body. On a very quiet acoustic part, it allowed me to get very, very close with a mic and then filter out the substantial proximity effect. Apart from the more typical workmanlike uses for a HP filter, I could hear something interesting happening when used on guitars and vocals between the 55Hz and 120Hz marks. It was never dramatic, but I would often find the sweet spot where a source would suddenly feel that little but fuller, even as I removed the low end.

There’s plenty of nuance here to explore, then, but with a little more time spent with the Lakeside, I began to get a much better feel for how the input and output control can be combined with the filter to access different sonic options that shape the tone, and how to dial in just the amount of saturation you might dare to capture when tracking. Of course, you can also use these tools when mixing, for more obvious effects and experimentation: it offers more than enough character once you’ve spent a bit of time getting to know it.

Summing Up

Today, for a very modest outlay, you can buy very capable preamps that will do a great job of cleanly amplifying the output from your microphones. Reviewing preamps can sometimes be a bit tricky: there’s a healthy and ongoing debate amongst audiophiles about just how much difference a preamp can (or should) make to a recording. The Lakeside, though, is clearly intended to offer more than amplification.

You can dial in saturation or head more into distortion territory, but either way I nearly always enjoyed what I heard.

In the course of testing the Lakeside for this review, I made a few audio examples so I could compare what the Lakeside offered with the results from the onboard preamps in my studio’s Audient mixing desk, and you can find these on the SOS website (https://sosm.ag/soyuz-lakeside-preamp). In more sedate settings, the differences are minimal — except that I often had a sense that the Lakeside offered a subtle boost to the low mids. Things always get rather more interesting with high‑end transformer‑based preamps, and the sonic differences between them more pronounced, when you ‘drive’ them with hotter input levels — and it was when doing this that I found the Lakeside really began to come alive. As I’ve mentioned, you can dial in saturation or head more into distortion territory, but either way I nearly always enjoyed what I heard — even if I sometimes decided the effect was a bit much for the current job.

In summary, the Lakeside is a beautifully crafted piece of equipment that’s a great new high‑end preamp option. Hand‑built, artisan equipment of this quality inevitably comes with a hefty price tag, but this box can do more than simply amplify your mic, and I reckon it’s a good thing that we have great options available to suit different budgets.

Summary

Conjuring up the spirit of high‑end analogue designs of old, the Lakeside is a premium mic preamp that encourages you to use your ears to explore the nuances that only a high‑quality transformer‑based preamp can bring to recording sessions.