Soyuz Lakeside

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...