Teknosign Box Line Double Width

With bold looks, original designs and affordable pricing, Teknosign’s preamp, EQ and compressor offer an intriguing alternative to better‑known names.

It’s amazing how things can fly under the radar, even in this age of information. I mean, if there was someone out there offering a large range of high‑quality analogue audio equipment, mostly based on original designs and built entirely in Europe, you’d expect to know about it, right? Especially if that equipment was being offered at very competitive prices? Well, perhaps I’m just out of the loop, but I hadn’t heard of Teknosign until I ran across their booth at this year’s NAMM Show. And when I did, I was impressed.

Analogue outboard is now a choice rather than a necessity, and the market has changed as a result. There used to be numerous European and American manufacturers who specialised in developing affordable, functional, engineering‑led designs, but quite a few have disappeared or changed their business models. The low end of the market is now dominated by Far Eastern manufacturing, and by copies of vintage outboard. A few companies successfully buck the trend — Drawmer, Radial Engineering, DAV and Lake People spring to mind — but increasingly it seems as though Western manufacturing and original designs are being squeezed out of the picture.

So it’s refreshing to encounter a European manufacturer who are doing things their own way. Based in Liguria, Italy, about halfway between Genoa and Pisa, Teknosign began producing audio equipment in 2011, building on the already extensive electronics manufacturing experience of company founders Riccardo Angeletti and Claudio Furno. Notably, Teknosign don’t just design equipment to be manufactured offshore: they build everything in their own factory, and in fact their relatively affordable prices are made possible by their ability to make almost every component themselves. PCBs, cases, knobs, buttons, switches, transformers and more are all produced in‑house, and the only items that have to be bought in are meters and audio connectors.

...it’s refreshing to encounter a European manufacturer who are doing things their own way. Based in Liguria, Italy, Teknosign began producing audio equipment in 2011. Notably, Teknosign don’t design equipment to be manufactured offshore: they build everything in their own factory...

What’s In The Box Line?

New items are being added to the Teknosign range all the time, with the launches at this year’s NAMM Show including lunchbox‑style guitar and bass amplifiers. There’s a pretty extensive selection of utility products, such as patchbays and power conditioners, and a handful of 1U rackmount processors including two summing mixers. But most of the company’s studio tools are currently offered as part of what they call the Box Line. These processors occupy one of two form factors, which can be used as freestanding desktop units or housed in a 2U rack enclosure that is sold separately. A single 2U rack housing can accommodate four standard Box Line processors or two Double Width units.

At the time of writing, there are nine products in the basic Box Line. Many of these are utility devices — there’s an active and a passive DI, a passive stereo mic splitter, a headphone amp, a powered USB hub and a phantom power supply, for example — but the Box Line also includes the single‑channel SSMP or Solid State Microphone Preamplifier, and what must be the world’s most compact 16:2 summing mixer. The Double Width range, meanwhile, comprises three products. The DSMP is a two‑channel version of the SSMP, the PEQ is a solid‑state equaliser inspired by the classic Pultec EQP‑1A, and the VMC is a rather interesting compressor, of which more presently. For the purposes of this review, Teknosign sent me these three units along with the one basic Box Line device I haven’t yet mentioned.

That device is called the RPS, and its diminutive front panel is home only to a fused IEC inlet and an on/off switch. Turn it around, though, and you’ll find eight DC power sockets. All powered Box Line and Double Width processors run on 24V DC, so a single RPS can be used to power up to eight units, with patch cables of different lengths included. It’s no different really from powering a guitar...