In this article Julian asks what guides equipment choice for professionals. Is it about quality, cost or something else?

Although our studios have largely been subsumed into the software domain, there is still a significant amount of hardware in every studio. When I say ‘hardware’ I’m not necessarily referring to studio outboard. Beyond the computer itself, every studio at least has an interface and some monitors and many have far more.

Professionals, running businesses and using their studios to generate income, use much of the same equipment as enthusiasts and hobbyists but their motivation and priorities are different. An important caveat - I use the word professional in the strictest sense here I'm not inferring that enthusiasts and hobbyists are necessarily any less talented, knowledgeable or serious about their work than the professionals.

I have been thinking about this while looking checking out some gear online and I’ve noticed that I sometimes put quite a lot of time into drilling down into the specifics of gear I’m interested in but I’ll disregard the gear I’m looking at in an instant if I see certain practical matters haven’t been addressed. Gear deal-breakers which no amount of positives can compensate for. I wondered whether my deal-breakers were shared by others and what other professionals found appealing or off-putting in hardware they were checking out. Here are some of my thoughts and some shared by members of the team.

Cost, Value And Build Quality

The first criterion for most of us is probably cost. After all ‘profit is what you don’t spend’ and as Russ recently pointed out tax write offs aren’t the free lunch some people assume them to be.

There is an intense downward pressure on the price of studio gear. All other things being equal why wouldn’t you chooser the cheaper of two alternatives? However, when it comes to hardware there is always the question of how something does what it does as well as what it does. In these days of online retail we less often get the chance to compare physical units side by side, where it only takes a moment to spot the inevitable cut corners in budget gear. Value isn’t the same as cost and with hardware, quality of construction is obvious when in the room with gear but almost impossible to convey online.

Because of this there can be surprises in both directions, with expensive gear which feels like a budget equivalent or budget gear which feels great. The point is you have to touch it to know.

Metal casework is a good sign, as are nutted jack sockets and XLRs which are screwed to the casework, These are reasonably easy to spot online, more difficult are nutted pots rather than pots mounted directly to circuit boards. Taking my BAE 1073mpf as an example, while this is an expensive item, it’s easy to tell where the money has gone just from the quality of the construction, you can buy things which look the same for far less, but you’ll feel the difference.

Sound

If gear is only being used in your studio then you’ll presumably look after it, so does this matter? That’s a personal choice. The sound of your gear is what ultimately matters but the fact that something looks the same as a pro product doesn’t mean it will sound like it.

This was raised by Dom Morley who commented that it was “a bit of a red flag if a clone looks identical but is much cheaper. Makes me think they’ve spent all the money on looking right and very little on sounding right.” The pro market influences the budget market and the market for ‘clones’ used to be largely populated by technical clones - Copies of the circuits and components of well known gear which could be bought ready assembled or as kits which looked nothing like the originals but sounded very close. These seem to have been replaced by gear which definitely looks like the original gear but doesn’t necessarily sound like it.

Power Supplies

A bugbear I know I share with a lot of people is the use of external power supplies. I don’t think you can draw a direct link between the use of an external power supply and the quality of a piece of gear. Lots of pro gear uses external supplies, including my BAE (though that is hardly a cheap universal DC adapter). But I do know that it’s a significant negative for me, particulary if it’s a flimsy DC adapter with no locking mechanism. My top tip for anyone with a studio is, if you don’t label anything else in your studio, label your power supplies. They mostly all look the same but after a studio spring clean you can be figuring out which goes with which for a surprisingly long time.

Service And Upgradeability

Asking the team, two priorities which came back were service and upgradeability. Both are different aspects of longevity. If you invest in a piece of quality gear you want to be able to use it for as long as you choose. As Nathaniel Reichman put it “Upgradability! Are there card options I can buy in the future if I need more/different I/O? Is it modular and therefore less likely to be made obsolete by a future software change?” Nathaniel and Steve DeMott are both Metric Halo users and no brand in this space exemplifies this quite as well as they do. Their interfaces are of top quality and are extremely flexible but they are also modular in that you can link interfaces together to create larger systems, you can do this with other manufacturer’s products too. But the thing which sets Metric Halo apart is in the upgradeability. While many manufacturers offer regular firmware upgrades, Metric Halo offer hardware upgrades too. Brands like DAD offer comprehensive modular options for IO but Metric Halo’s 3D hardware upgrade allow users to update old interfaces which no longer use a current data connection to the current technology.

Likewise for service, when I was choosing my preamps some years ago I chose to get a BAE rather than the equivalent Neve because BAE doesn’t use any surface mount components and so will be serviceable for as long as techs can wield soldering irons. Some brands are known for their long support of their products. Others not so much. Professionals clearly seem to prioritise service and aftercare as much as price.

Doing One Thing Well

Something which is clear in the feedback we received from the team is that quality of results are important. More important than variety of results. This is more applicable to outboard equipment than it is to other categories of hardware but if something excels in one area, that is enough and is preferable to gear which is flexible but unexceptional. As Steve DeMott put it he is “wary of gear that goes the Swiss Army knife route. Most of the time I need a piece of gear for a specific purpose, and I’d rather it do that one thing really well than do a whole bunch of things marginally well.” Although Michael Costa commented that “Perhaps a notable exception to that is the Distressor which does promote itself (and pretty much delivers) on this versatility point”.

There is more to hardware than sound though. In my recent article on clutter in the studio I explained my belief that well designed hardware can streamline workflows and attention to detail and good design can add value to a product which is hard to appreciate from the marketing materials. I often reference my Nord Electro 6D as an example of a well designed product which is worth what it is worth because it is so well thought through, with nice touches which anticipate potential problems and address them. Two examples are seamless transitions and organising by page, explained below.

Function

A problem which you might encounter playing keys live is that when changing sounds during a song, the previous sound gets cut off when you change patch, making a slick transition from one patch to the next impossible. Seamless transitions allow the Electro 6D to hold the previous sound allowing you to switch to the next one and play the next part without interruption - Great.

Organise by page is brilliant because the panel layout and patch numbering system on my Nord makes four patches available from the front panel from dedicated buttons and you can page between patches in groups of four. For this reason most users organise their sets in groups of four patches per song, often leaving three patch slots empty if only one sound is needed. Last minute set changes would be a potential nightmare if it wasn’t possible to move or swap sounds in pages of four as well as individually. This is easy to do on a laptop over USB but a professional will value the option to do it from the front panel. Attention to detail!

Cost And Value Aren’t The Same

Speaking with the team it appears that I am right in thinking that professionals aren’t price-sensitive. They are value-sensitive and if an expensive product represents good value they will pay for it. Making something as cheaply as possible can be very attractive to professionals, but only if the value to their business isn’t compromised. Using inexpensive Android tablets for meter display on a bank of S1s is a great idea. Buying bargain-basement lightweight mics stands is probably a false economy.

What are the red flags for you when it comes to studio hardware? Are there any straight out deal-breakers? What are your priorities when choosing hardware?