SSL Revival 4000

Solid State Logic dust off the blueprints of their E-series console to create a classy channel strip.

An illustrious heritage can be a mixed blessing. On the one hand, you have brand recognition that newer companies would kill for. On the other, people can be reluctant to accept that a manufacturer with a heritage might want to move on from it. Shure, for example, have produced some outstanding mics in recent years, but the SM57 remains their best-seller.

On this side of the Atlantic, Solid State Logic have continually pushed the technological envelope, first with super-sophisticated analogue consoles like the J- and K-series, then with hybrid designs such as the AWS and Duality. Today, those who associate the SSL name primarily with innovation can point to the digital T-series mixer and the fully recallable yet analogue Oracle as beacons of this philosophy. But there will always be people who hanker after the ‘SSL sound’ of consoles from the 1980s, and the company have been pretty good at catering to this market too.

As long ago as 2006, SSL’s XLogic range included a faithful 1U recreation of the G-series bus compressor, as well as a product called the E-Signature Channel, which offered pretty much the full feature set of a channel strip from the revered E-series console, with some additional bells and whistles. Today’s range includes 500-series recreations of various elements from their mixers, as well as plug-in emulations of most of the sought-after SSL designs. And, as of now, it also features a 1U rackmounting hardware processor that offers pretty much the full feature set of a channel strip from the revered E-series console...

The Revival

The new Revival 4000 is, however, far from being a reissue of the XLogic E-Signature Channel. To the core feature set, that device added a switchable alternative mic preamp circuit employing SSL’s transformerless VHD technology, and a second dynamics stage that recreated the notorious Listen Mic Compressor. It also featured a slot for an optional A-D converter card. All three are absent from the Revival 4000, but this time around, SSL have added a de-esser and a balanced insert point. There are also numerous points of difference concerning how this is all switched and laid out, and the cosmetics of the two units are quite unlike, but perhaps the biggest difference concerns the price. The E-Signature Channel retailed at around £4000$5000, placing it out of reach of most project and home-studio owners. Since then, SSL have built up offshore manufacturing facilities that have allowed them to drastically reduce prices, and the Revival 4000 costs just £1499$1999.

With its thick metal fascia, smoothly and evenly weighted controls with detents at the zero positions, and clear, precise legending, it feels every bit a professional product.

Offshoring once carried connotations of shonky build quality, but every SSL hardware product I’ve reviewed has been rock solid, and the Revival 4000 is no exception. With its thick metal fascia, smoothly and evenly weighted controls with detents at the zero positions, and clear, precise legending, it feels every bit a professional product. Nor have SSL cheaped out in any way on the design; the Revival 4000 has an integrated PSU, and practically every switched function has an LED to let you know whether it’s active or not. Internally, the mic preamp uses the same Jensen JT-115K-E transformer found in the original E-series channel strip.

All the audio I/O is on the rear panel, starting with an XLR mic input and a combi XLR/jack line input. (The latter is not designed to accommodate instruments that need to see a high input impedance.) Insert send and return, on balanced jacks, are followed by a compressor side-chain input on another combi socket, and a separate stereo link jack. Finally, the output signal emerges on a male XLR.

True Grit

The SSL mic preamp might not have the cachet of some other vintage designs, but it’s certainly versatile. The variable gain control runs from +20 to +70 dB, and there’s also an input pad and a trim control with a ±20dB range that applies to both mic and line inputs. Consequently, if you want to drive it harder for a bit of warmth, that’s very much possible, while a huge amount of gain is available through the system as a whole, as there’s a further ±20dB trim on the output stage.

The de-esser is a simple one-knob affair with a three-LED gain-reduction meter, but the main dynamics section presents the ‘full fat’ SSL channel compressor and expander/gate. In fact, it’s more comprehensive than the implementation in their recent 4K G plug-in, thanks to its switchable hard-knee and linear-release options. Release times are fully variable, as are the compressor ratio and expander/gate range, but in both cases there’s the traditional choice of two fixed attack times. A single button switches between gate (1:infinity) and expander (1:2) mode, and the compressor and expander/gate have separate five-segment LED meters. A quirk of SSL’s design is that the gain-reduction meters on linked units remain independent, even though they are both compressing by the same amount.

For further control over the dynamics, it’s possible to switch either or both of the main filter and EQ sections into the compressor side-chain. However, the provision of a dedicated de-esser eliminates one of the main reasons to do this, allowing you to use the EQ for tone-shaping instead. And both the filters and the EQ are extremely powerful tools for this purpose. The filters have a huge range, extending up to 500Hz for the high-pass and down to 3kHz for the low-pass, while the main EQ section is highly versatile. The low-mid and high-mid bands are fully parametric, and their ranges overlap significantly, so you can for instance notch out a resonance whilst applying a broadband boost in the same region. The low and high bands can be switched between shelving and bell modes, and a BLK button switches the EQ response to ‘black knob’ mode, as found in most SSL consoles after 1983.

There’s something that just feels indefinably ‘right’ about the SSL EQ.

In both modes, there’s something that just feels indefinably ‘right’ about the SSL EQ. With ±15dB range on every band, it’s capable of radically altering the timbre of any signal, yet it rarely sounds strained or harsh. Conversely, even small adjustments have an authoritative effect, so you’re never left wondering whether your settings are actually doing anything.

All Singing

I think most of us accept nowadays that if we want ultra-precise control, super-fine detail and comprehensive recall, software is the way to go. Our reasons for choosing hardware are more to do with the broader sonic qualities that it can impart, whether that be coloration from valves and transformers or the unique dynamic characteristics of opto cells and VCAs. In doing so, we are often sacrificing features in return for that character. What’s striking about the SSL Revival 4000 is that although it’s consciously billed as a vintage-inspired product, it never feels limited in terms of functionality.

If anything, in fact, you could argue that it has more features than most of us are likely to need, and that tasks such as de-essing and gating are best left to the mix and handled by plug-ins. That’s no reflection on SSL’s circuits, which work perfectly well, but it’s not as though a de-esser really has analogue mojo. Personally, therefore, I’d perhaps rather SSL had retained the Listen Mic Compressor from the E-Signature Channel in place of the de-esser, though the expander/gate has always been a core feature of the original SSL console channel strip.

Some vintage-inspired processors are one-trick ponies, imparting their sonic qualities pretty much regardless of how they’re set up. By contrast, the Revival 4000 is endlessly versatile.

Some vintage-inspired processors are one-trick ponies, imparting their sonic qualities pretty much regardless of how they’re set up. By contrast, the Revival 4000 is endlessly versatile. Yes, you can coax some grit and colour from it, but you have to make a conscious decision to do so. Used normally, it’s just a very good front end for any source in any style of music — and, thanks to its separate line input, an excellent line-level processor at mixdown. In fact, it says everything you need to know about the SSL console’s influence on music that this actually feels like a perfectly contemporary product. It may be billed as a revival, but it never really went away!