Description
Audient is a British console manufacturer founded in 1997 by Dave Dearden and Gareth Davies, both ex-Soundcraft and ex-DDA. Audient has a design philosophy of high-quality, good-value audio electronics with a clean signal path and their products have strong following
The ASP008 is a dedicated preamp designed to add eight high-quality microphone pre-amp channels to an existing audio interface, console or DAW setup. Each channel has the usual variable gain, switchable 48V phantom power and a phase flip switch. Audient adds a switchable high-pass 12 dB / octave filter with variable frequency (25-250 Hz), mic input impedance switch (200 / 1200 / 5000 Ω), signal & peak level indicators and a line input switch. Channels 1 & 2 also have a switchable 20 dB pad and an Instrument (DI) input. Preamps are of a discrete Class A transistor design also fitted to Audient consoles
“The ASP008 by Audient is by far one of the best sounding preamps I have heard and I’ve used quite a lot of stuff out there, however this one is in a league of it’s own”
“Technically these preamps are very good indeed, with a bandwidth much wider than the audible 20Hz-20kHz spectrum (-3dB at 300kHz!) and a noise floor that would need you to seriously violate the laws of physics to reduce much further without supercooling the studio!”
“At the price (I paid just under a £1000) I couldnt find anything that gave the same quality preamps, with the same functionality (impedance switching, and variable hi-pass filter being the two stand outs I think). I have the digital card in there so as to let me expand my UCX easily to ten channels via ADAT, and I can’t hear anything wrong with the conversion at all. Hence 5 stars all the way down the list”
“Here is a classical quartet (strings and flute) sample recorded using the Audient 008 + ADAT option. Its been a very useful and versatile pre-amp for me over the last couple of years”
“I think the Audient ASP008 preamps are really good.. You know, good British engineering.. heh”
“Somewhere on here [Gearslutz] is a thread we did comparing several of the 8 channel boxes in this range, including the Octo and True. The Audient came out on top for overall sound and features. It was not the winner in every aspect, but overall it just had that right combo of price, features, and sound, if you are in this price range”
This ASP008 has come direct from the rack of a top UK producer. He used it for additional mic inputs on one project and it is otherwise unused. It is in excellent condition
