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 pedalboard, except that you don’t have to worry about devices with non‑standard requirements, and the front‑panel on/off switch on the RPS means you don’t need to access the rear‑panel on/off buttons on the processors themselves.

Primary Colours

With their contrasting blue front panels and red knobs, the Box Line products are eye‑catching and very distinctive. I rather like the cosmetics, which come across as friendly and functional at the same time, and the only minor criticism I can level is that because the knobs protrude quite a long way from the cases, any legending underneath them is hard to see. The cases are made of aluminium, and seem robust. The settings of switched functions such as phantom power on the mic preamp or bypass on the compressor are clearly indicated using LEDs. Some of the controls on the review units were a little wobbly and I’d have liked a bit more resistance from the pots, but in general there’s nothing to suggest they wouldn’t survive intensive use over a long period.

A single RPS power supply can power up to eight Box Line units.Audio I/O on all three of the Double Width units is exclusively on rear‑panel XLRs, and is limited to the basic ins and outs. There’s no external side‑chain input or stereo link function on the compressor, for example (although a 1U stereo version is in the works), and no high‑impedance input on the mic preamp. All are designed to operate at ‘professional’ levels, with the compressor and equaliser accepting inputs of up to +20dBu and the metering configured so that 0VU=+4dBu. All three come with 24V external power supplies, so the RPS is very much an optional convenience rather than a necessity.

Turning first to the mic preamp, this offers a 69dB gain range in 1dB steps, courtesy of coarse (10dB) and fine (1dB) rotary switches. Phantom power and polarity are individually switchable for each channel, as are not one but two filters. The high‑pass filter has a 12dB/octave slope turning over at 80Hz, and there’s also the much more unusual option of a 6dB/octave low‑pass filter turning over at 10kHz. The circuit itself is a transformerless, solid‑state design, and offers a huge frequency range of 15Hz to 300kHz. The most surprising specification, though, is the 600Ω input impedance.

Nowadays, most gear is designed to have comparatively high input impedances and low output impedances. The rule of thumb is that if the input impedance is at least 10 times the output impedance of the source device, loading effects will be minimal and the frequency content of the source will be preserved. Typically, therefore, modern mic preamps have an input impedance of at least 1.5kΩ and often much more, while mics are commonly specified with a 150Ω output impedance. The DSMP’s design could be seen as harking back to an earlier era when impedances were matched to maximise power transfer. Practically speaking, it’s likely to make little difference with electronically balanced mics, but could have a noticeable effect on the sound of transformer‑balanced designs, especially vintage ribbon and dynamic models.

That was borne out to an extent in my testing. The DSMP is certainly a very capable general‑purpose mic preamp, and when confronted with a modern capacitor mic, does exactly what you’d hope, amplifying the signal without adding tonal changes, distortion or noise. But it sounded particularly good on, for example, the Warm Audio WA‑44 I reviewed in last month’s issue. As a sort of joint test I recorded an entire song using nothing but the WA‑44 through the DSMP (and, on occasion, the PEQ), and the results really jumped out of the speakers in a way that recordings made with ribbon mics don’t always do.

The choice of VU meters gives the DSMP vintage appeal, but means that if you want your output to register at a healthy mark on an A‑D converter calibrated to professional levels, you’ll have to get used to the sight of the needle being pinned against the end stops. Not a problem in itself, but it would be nice if there was also some visual indication of overloads. Put an attenuating device in the signal chain after the DSMP — the VMC will do nicely — and you can overdrive it to good effect, though you need to be a little bit careful as the onset of saturation is quite sudden. Approached more conservatively, I’d be happy to use the DSMP for critical tasks such as stereo main pairs, and my measurements suggested that the two channels on the review unit were matched to within 0.1dB or so.

What, No Valves?

Of the three Double Width units in the Box Line range, the PEQ is the only one that’s obviously indebted to a vintage design. Its three EQ bands follow the template established by the classic Pultec EQP‑1A, meaning that you can apply up to 15dB boost and/or cut in the low band, up to 15dB semi‑parametric boost in the midrange and a separate high‑frequency cut. The Pultec is a passive equaliser that uses a valve make‑up gain stage, and hence is sometimes described as a valve EQ. Both the valve stage and the input and output transformers contribute to its distinctive thickness or colour, and engineers have been known to patch a Pultec in set flat, for these qualities alone. That’s not something you’d do with the PEQ, which is a transformerless device that uses solid‑state circuitry in its active stages, but it’s still a pretty sweet‑sounding EQ. With midrange boosts in particular, there’s an appealing ‘lightness’ to the sound that might be harder to extract from a full‑fat Pultec, and of course you can still do the well‑known trick of simultaneously boosting and cutting in the low band that is so characteristic of the Pultec design.

Compared with the original, Teknosign have added extra switched frequency options to the low band and the high‑cut band. The latter are all at potentially useful frequencies, and although I had my doubts about the value of the 20Hz and 25Hz settings on the former, their effect can be audible well into the midrange — and when you do the simultaneous cut/boost thing, each setting does sound distinctly different. Selecting the 20Hz setting and turning both the Boost and Cut controls a long way up can do something very nice for bass instruments, and makes a surprising difference even on more midrange‑y sources such as vocals.

And so to the compressor, which is perhaps the most unusual of the three units. VMC stands for “variable‑mu compressor”, a term that usually denotes the use of a valve as the gain‑control device. But, like the other two Double Width units, the VMC is a defiantly solid‑state affair. Little information is forthcoming about the actual operating principle, but unlike many actual valve compressors it has the full set of standard controls, with attack and release both running from 10ms to 500ms and six ratio settings including 1:1 at one end of the scale and infinity:1 (limiting) at the other. The VU meter can be set to display either gain reduction or input level, and there’s a hard bypass button as well as two further knobs. On the review unit, these were rather misleadingly labelled Makeup and Master; the Makeup control is actually a wet/dry mix balance knob, while the Master applies ±20dB make‑up gain following this.

Despite the absense of valves and transformers, the VMC certainly isn’t a boring utility compressorr, but neither is it a one‑trick pony.

Despite the absence of valves and transformers, the VMC certainly isn’t a boring utility compressor, but neither is it a one‑trick pony. With longish time constant settings, it does the sort of gentle smoothing‑out that I associate with some old‑school designs: not transparent, exactly, but instinctively sympathetic to the source, and seeming to maintain the natural dynamics of a voice or bass guitar even as it shaves 10dB off the louder bits. Turn the release control all the way anti‑clockwise and it gets somewhat more ‘grabby’, and can be made to pump on percussive sources, though it’ll never be as fast as something like an 1176. Initially I wasn’t convinced that the wet/dry control was going to be all that useful, but discovered that blending a small amount of the dry signal back in can be a really nice alternative to backing off the threshold when you’ve gone just that bit too far. As is often the case, I got the best results when I set the controls by ear rather than by eye; this is much easier to do on hardware than it is with plug‑ins, and led me to use settings I wouldn’t have thought to try otherwise. The forthcoming stereo version will make for a really tasty bus processor at, one hopes, a very competitive price.

Box Clever

All in all, I think there’s a lot to like about these cheerful and compact little boxes. The competitive pricing may be apparent in the feel of the controls, but it certainly isn’t reflected in either the sound or the capabilities of these processors. They lend themselves equally well to desktop or rackmount use, and the fact that each Double Width unit comes with its own power supply also means that they’re self‑contained, so you can get started without the need for a 500‑series chassis or similar. Then, once you have a couple of Teknosign processors in your collection, you can think about adding the RPS to help tidy everything up.

As I mentioned at the start of this review, using analogue outboard in this day and age is a matter of choice rather than necessity. Teknosign’s comprehensive range opens up that choice to many new people without compromising on audio quality.