Slate Digital Virtual Microphone System

[Marius]

After being announced more than a year ago, it looks like the fabled Slate VMS is finally coming out.

Conceptually it's a pretty fascinating product...a hardware/software combo of microphones and software character emulations for classic mic/amp chains that isn't based on simple convolution or filtering or anything like that. You use one of the Slate mics, which are apparently very neutral and well made, and then you feed them through the pre-amp and microphone models in the Virtual Mix Rack and the result is an exact sonic replica of the super expensive chains that most of us would never be able to afford.

Kind of like the Kemper Profiling Amp but for microphones.

I like the idea of a single neutral hardware item being used in conjunction with software to offer more flexibility. I don't personally have much of a use for this, but it is interesting. I look forward to reading and watching some reviews once it gets into people's hands.

[Aesthete]

Some pretty big claims and hype as usual from Slate. Will be interesting if they get close. Would be worth it alone for the Mic models and the Telefunken pre emulation. 1K is a good price point IMO. Could give them a big advantage over UA.

[Thomas Mavian]

I listened to the "demo" in the intro video and honestly wouldn't even try to guess which microphone was which. But I'm finding the target audience a bit hard to grasp. "Professionals" certainly have a few good preamps and a collection of mics and if need be they add another "real" microphone or preamp. This seems to me to be targeted at the "wannabe" engineer? Or am I just way of thinking that?

Our means for recording vocals are quite simple, an Audio Technica AT-4047 fed into a Drawmer MX60 which in turn goes into a Presonus Firestudio Project preamp. That's it. It's what we (I) use almost 95% of the time. The other 5% is screaming into an old Dixon DM-1168 dynamic microphone that people throw after you when you say what you record with

I think most will misuse (if you can misuse anything) this type of technology and drive the preamps way more than would be "normal". Not that it's bad or wrong in any way, but it kind of misses the mark of the subtleties of different microphones.

No, I'm not trying to be "old school", just saying that I'm in no need of any more parameters to tweak so this is not for me. I want to make more music.

[Lawrence]

Antares tried to go this route years ago. Occasionally, you could get some interesting results as long as you ignored what the models were supposed to be.