AMI Brings Telefunken Up To Date

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Dec 22, 2010 2:26 PM

While many companies essay to bring new technologies to the audio market, a few have found that there is a burly urge for typical products that have been left at the back in the audio industry's insane dash to the digital future. One such firm is AMI's TAB Funkenwerk brand, that is leveraging typical route designs by the Telefunken name, formulating

Founder and President Oliver Archut began his vocation at AEG, the primogenitor firm of Telefunken. While there, he performed all the authorised record is to company's typical products, that were being discarded. Archut took it home as a pastime and began requesting the ability to his selected audio apparatus correct business, finally relocating to the United States.

Seeing a burly future marketplace for typical Telefunken products that are matching with modern college of music apparatus and techniques, Archut began his own firm that specialized in blood vessel preamplifiers and connected products. The key to their genuine sound lies in the preamplifiers, that are all built in-house. From there, TAB Funkenwerk has practical its unique skill to transformers and a accumulation of product lines.

One area of success has been in blood vessel microphone preamplifiers, formed on the initial V72S route used at places similar to Abbey Road Studios and many EMI studios opposite Europe. The V72S was renouned since it could accomplish 6dB more earn than competing models, that was a outrageous in addition to in the recording process. TAB Funkenwerk written its modern counterpart, the V78M, using the same schematic, their hand-built transformers and using "new-old" batch of the initial Telefunken and Philips void tubes.

Product upgrades over the initial add such features as a stage inverter, belligerent resistive buffer, 48V haunt power and switchable 120Hz shelving. This draw close has given TAB Funkenwerk a certain and continuing citation opposite its full operation of products, all of that underline selected blood vessel sound amalgamated with modern features and design.

"On the V78M, you obviously broken up the earn in to a attraction switch and a perfume earn switch," mentioned AMI's Joe Hauck, clamp boss of sales and marketing. "That allows the user to indemnify for tinge changes in the earn structure. The perfume earn is destined from the feedback route and amplifier circuit. When you're at -60 submit attraction and 40dB on the perfume gain, you're primarily using a typical V72S.

"When you change the impedance, you are varying the tonality of a preamp," he said. "The V78M allows the user to sustain that tinge at any submit turn or to use it imaginatively to expostulate harmonics and emanate the type of blood vessel exaggeration that can add density to a masculine outspoken or electric guitar, for instance."

Another preamp model formed on the same initial circuitry, the V72M, combines those two controls in to a singular knob. "We've blended the submit attraction and perfume earn on the V72M," Hauck said. "The objective is to make the preamp sound the same tonally opposite the whole earn structure: from -6 to 60, it sounds the same."

From preamps, TAB Funkenwerk has moreover stretched in to the area many audio folks pick out with the Telefunken name: microphones. "It was innate for use to precedence our capability on transformers to make outlay transformers for microphones," Hauck continued. "We right away make chronological versions of the VV8 is to U47 in addition to a chronological chronicle of the T14 done is to C12 and Elam 251, and a accumulation of others. We do a lot of OEM work for other companies together with creation our own microphones."

The company's flagship mic is the Lucas CS-1, that is formed on the typical AKG C12 model. "We're using the David Bock-specified capsule, that you feel is the most appropriate CK12 pill distraction in the world," Hauck said. "The CS-1 not a clone; rather, it is the outcome of devising what would come about if they initial designers had today's capabilities existing to them. For example, back then, relays were too large to fit inside a mic. But now, you can, and that allows us to have a loyal cardioid where you obviously shut off the back half of the pill electronically. We written our own transformer to fit with a large batch of new-old tubes you picked up."

Thus, the company's Lucas CS-1 is loyalty to the C12, not a clone. Similarly, the Lucas CS-4 was written and built as loyalty to the initial U47, using TAB Funkenwerk's in-house transformers, built to Neumann's initial specifications from 1950.