The sunn Forum
Other Musical Equipment => Biamp => Topic started by: D.M.N. on June 23, 2019, 07:00:29 pm
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Well it's been 7 years since someone posted in this sub-forum, but the hell with it.
I'm starting to assemble a small home studio, getting pieces like a 1/2" 8 track tape machine, etc, and I saw a Biamp 1642 come up for sale locally for a decent price. Power supply and cable included, everything working as it should. There doesn't seem to be much info out there on the internet regarding them, so what can any of y'all tell me about it? Do you like the way they sound, are they noisy, anything and everything you can. I've seen them mentioned on gearslutz a few times as being able to get a really nice driven preamp distortion, and that they're solid work horses, the only real downside being the channels aren't modular. So what's the word?
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I don't know much of anything about the 1642...however I recently (in the last year) picked up a Biamp Legend 2016...here's what I know about it:
Discrete preamp section and then it goes into the the standard 4558 opamp topology that just about every console maker from the 70's on has used...
I spent a few days getting my board up to snuff with some help from a guy I contacted at gears;uts who used to work for Sunn...he was super helpful, and slightly brilliant.
I currently have a Sony console/a SOundcraft 200b and an ancient and unheard of "Amerimex Studio Mixer" vintage tank...the Biamp beats them all...
There seems to be a small window of production when Biamp was making mixers/small footprint consoles before they went over to full on commercial sound reinforcement manf....this small window has some under-the-radar-gems and probably some other things that are NOT gems...
My Biamp has 16 buses and 20 channels, is quiet as a mouse and some of the best pre's of any console I've ever worked on...it just works...its a small frame inline style console that does the same thing as a large format console...EQ's work quite reasonable, musical, but not overdone...16 buses makes it ver versatile...
I use it almost exclusively now because its dependable and plan on adding transformers to it because I can and why not?