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Anybody ever hear of Malmac X10 AJ line transformers? They're 600 ohms:600 ohms and came out of an old Ampex duplicating chain recorder electronics, I think. Are they any good?

Thanks,

Seth

PS. This is all CJ's fault. I would have chucked them before.

Comments

anonymous Mon, 01/19/2004 - 23:00

you very well could...

you could put it on the output of jakob's 1176, or a solid state version of the pultec, or a line amp like the hamptone mic pre-- though it doesn't neccessarily need active circuitry around it.

i use mic pre's alot when i'm mixing-- not for gain, but just getting certain trannies to impose a sound that you just can't eq onto something... many mixers don't always want wide bandwidth for every channel-- that's why ssl's and harrisons (and others) had high and low pass filters per channel.

i had a gates staylevel that i almost never used for compression, the trannies made everything sound HUGE. i'll use other trannies to focus a sound's midrange to bring it to the front of the mix, or give it big top and bottom to sit back further in the mix. and i usually record everything big because you can always give it presence later...

eq first started as just a mid-range boost for movies-- they couldn't get in close to the actors without getting the mic in frame (not very directional mics), so they boosted midrange to "bring the sound in". a little more focused mids are what i find usually work best for vocals-- getting them ceentered without having to turn them up too loud. and you can certainly get that midrange focus/presence with the addition of a particuliar trannie in the signal path.

anonymous Tue, 11/30/2010 - 00:10

Hi JRMINTZ !
I have an old Ampex that has 3 MALMAC transformers on it. It is a mono-block of 130 Watts output. It has four 6550 in a push pull settlement. The output transformer has 1750 Ohms input and 106 Ohms output in a frequency range from 20Hz to 50Khz.
I could not resist to see what was in the box so I opened it. Inside there is a 6 pound single core transformer.
There are still two small drive transformers in the pre-amplification circuit.
I wish someone will have a clue on where to find another core just like that from the same company of course..
Cheers!