Alta Moda AM-30

Alta Moda AM-30 is a pre-amp for the 500 series, manufactured by Alta Moda.

History
The Alta Moda AM-30 was released in 2014.

Official description
The first preamp offering from Alta Moda Audio, the AM-30 is in a class of its own. Not contrived or cloned from other designs, the AM-30 is truly unique in its approach to microphone pre-amplification.

The Class-A transformerless electronics of the AM-30 are fully discrete and wide bandwidth. Clean at lower gain settings, the AM-30 can be smoothly over-driven by increasing input level or gain. Where other preamps would harshly hard-clip when pushed, the AM-30 smoothly begins to saturate, adding rich, low-order harmonics to the signal.

With its exceptional performance on a wide range of sources such as guitars, drums, bass and vocals, the AM-30 delivers a sound that is big, punchy, bold and clear.

Its high input impedance and high headroom make the AM-30 great on line level signals too; perfect for re-amping guitars or warming up previously recorded tracks and loops.

And like all Alta Moda Audio products, the AM-30 preamp is entirely hand-built in the USA, and uses some of the finest components available.

An 11-position rotary switch sets overall gain of the first amplifier stage. Unlike other transformerless designs, this first stage has soft, even-order harmonic overload characteristics, similar to a vacuum tube triode.

Controls the output level of the AM-30. It is a true continuous fader; it ranges from "0" up to an additional 6 dB of overall boost.

To make recording session setup easier, the AM-30 is equipped with a simple "signal present" indicator light. Since it is difficult to clip the AM-30's front end (and better to judge sound quality by ear), no clip indicator is needed.

A standard 1/4" phone jack allows instruments such as bass and keyboards to be amplified directly. This FET-based circuit drives the input of the preamp just as a microphone would.

The AM-30 is compatible with any 500 series rack system which has 48V phantom power available. To achieve its maximum headroom, the AM-30 effectively uses all three available power supply rails for its power source.