The Panipulator plugin allows the flipping of panning, flipping of left/right phase individually, and includes a mono button for summing stereo mixes. Not a mix goes by where I don’t use the Panipulator plugin. I consider the ultimate utility plugin.

I have plans of creating specific guides for the Panipulator plugin that show you exactly how to use it effectively. In the mean time, if you have any questions feel feel to post on the Audio Engineering forum.

For more info or to freely download either the Mac or PC VST versions of Panipulator head to the Panipulator page.

Brandon

Fact: You can use all the plugins individually on tracks, buses, everywhere, etc. Man, do I like ‘em…A TON! I was under the impression that I wouldn’t be able to use them as “normal” plugins, but in fact that’s exactly what they are.

With 99% of the plugins that I’ve used, they’ve all been super clean and attempting to be transparent. There’s nothing necessarily wrong with transparent if you don’t have a pulse, but I like color! I think this clean obsession is a MAJOR problem in home recording land. So many people are looking for clean, clean, and more clean. When I listen to my favorite recordings, I’m hearing character, character, and more character when I want it. The T-Racks plugins provide this character thing better than any plugins I’ve used to date.

What Do You Get?
T-Racks includes all the essential tools for the gig. Compressors, EQ, limiters, multi-band compressors, linear phase EQ, and even a cool metering plugin that displays peak level, RMS level, and phase. I’m too busy to rewrite their propaganda and features. You can read all that junk on the T-Racks 3 website.

The Idear
All of the T-Racks 3 plugins have taken the non-modern (and dare I say “analog”) route in regard to their controls and intended sound. I mean that most plugins have 400 knobs and buttons that allow for all kinds of fancy tweaking. T-Racks 3 has went a more old school route to sonics and usability.

For example, the Classic Multiband Limiter has thresholds for 3 bands, level for 3 bands, and two different crossover points. When compared to a Waves C4 or equivalent with at least twice the knobs, at first you scratch your head. I did. I quickly found out that this particular plugin is not intended for microsurgery by any means. It doesn’t allow you to set ratios. Release time doesn’t go below 80ms. It’s clear this thing is saying, “I do what I do. If you don’t like it, too bad!” This sort of thing is consistent with high end vintagy tubey type gear and a welcome addition. This thing has A SOUND!

The Classic Compressor is similar. It’s attack time will not go any faster than 12ms. Why all plugins think they need to do all things for all people is beyond me. I LOVE the idea that a plugin is going to do it’s thing even if that means you can’t use it as a brickwall limiter. (T-Racks 3 has that covered on another plugin.) This slightly less flexibility approach gives more options for character!

The Program EQ 1A is the T-Racks version of a Pultec. For you new guys, a Pultec is a way old school EQ known for having massive, massive character. They rarely go for under $3,000. They have 2 bands. You pick a frequency and either you boost it or you cut it. The Program EQ 1A has taken the exact same format. From a features standpoint, the Pultec is a biplane in a world of B2 bombers and space stations. However, it does something right and is still insanely popular! So having 400 knobs on a plugin ain’t all it’s cracked up to be. T-Racks 3 clearly recognizes this.

The Sound
CHARACTER! CHARACTER! CHARACTER! I really don’t want to use the “v” word (starts with v, ends with “intage”) because that word doesn’t mean anything to most of us. When you think of what a dirty ol’, expensive tube compressor is going to do to your tracks, that’s pretty much what they were going for with T-Racks 3 most of the time.

If you choose to push ‘em, the T-Racks plugins, will ooze out life and excitement. They have a way of taking boring tracks and adding something extra to them. They can make the audio more harmonically complex. (My best attempt at avoiding buzz words.) While I’m sure most of you aren’t dying to nail the Beatles sound, imagine your tracks you’ve recorded that sound a little “plain”. When you blend in a little “Beatlesness” to your snare, electric guitars, vox, or whatever it doesn’t end up sounding “Beatley”. It ends up sounding WAY more like your favorite records…even if they came out last year. The most modern sounding records are still using the good ol’ gear. They are just using it in different ways.

So for those of us who don’t have $100,000 to outfit our rooms with an arsenal of mega hardware, I think the T-Racks 3 deal offers some TREMENDOUS possibilities for the creatively inclined.

URS was my go to compressors when I wanted color. I don’t see myself using them so much anymore. The T-Racks compressors and limiters just take it a step further in terms of bold attitude. There are multiple stages you can intentionally overload the T-Racks compressors and limiters. I’ve found this to be absolutely pleasing when I’m in the mood for a little bit of extra something on a given track. Even their brickwall limiter gives you the option of being clean, saturated, and a few in between. I found this AWESOMELY useful!

Don’t get me wrong. When used cleanly, the T-Racks plugins ARE clean. They don’t sound distorted or crappy. They sound quite nice. However, my experience and mixing style suggests that pushing instruments just a hair is EXACTLY what separates a great mix from a boring one. (Okay, there are a FEW more factors than that, but you get the idea.) Needless to say, having the ability to switch between 3 different saturation modes on a brickwall limiter in addition to clean, clipping, and 4 advanced settings (to predict upcoming peaks) is exactly what I need. The ability to bring out the guns when I need it is extremely important to me!

Mastering In Home Recording Land
I have my philosophies on mastering and they seem to coincide much more with the guys who are actually making records than with the “compliance professionals”. It’s a long story…….

T-Racks is an exhaustive set of plugins that have a TON of character when you want them to. Can you process a mix with them? Sure! They provide an interesting set of tonal colors that is fun to have around! However, is there anything particularly special about them that makes them the ONLY tool for mastering? Not at all. If you are saying to yourself “Oh FINALLY! I can master now”, than you are going to be surprised when you get a collection of EQ and compressors/limiters.

The ability to chain multiple T-Racks 3 plugins within a single plug in instance is a huge help for those of you using audio recording software that doesn’t allow for a ton of plugins on the stereo bus.

T-Racks 3 doesn’t make any attempt to handle the dominant role of mastering. That is to turn a collection of EXCELLENT mixes into an album with a common tonality. I was really hoping they’d make concessions for this in some way. It appears that Cubase is still my favorite tool for this. So far, I’ve not found a better way to process mixes individually and skip back and forth from track to track to ensure tonality and volumes are consistent.

CPU Usage
I’m currently using a Quad Core 2.33Ghz PC with 4GB of RAM on a highly optimized Windows XP SP3 install. I can use Waves plugins all day long. I can use a dozen guitar emulators without really thinking about it. I noticed that the T-Racks 3 plugins do use quite a bit more CPU power than other plugins I own. I actually had to pay a little attention to my CPU meter for the first time. So fair warning.

Conclusion
The T-Racks 3 series is an excellent set of plugins. The provide bold character that is clearly more in the old school arena. I think they are an excellent compliment to the Sonnox Oxford plugins which are quite a bit cleaner.

As for the “mastering” part, don’t sell yourself short. If you don’t toss the T-Racks Opto compressor on your drum bus, you aren’t living! The Fairchild wannabe is SWEET on vocals. If you want to toss this stuff on the 2bus too, have at it. However, this thing is way more than a “mastering” suite and you’ve still got to use your recording software to bounce back and forth for consistency setting.

Red Flag #1: Just The Guitar Track
For those of you who EVER post a clip of just one solo’d instrument, you are in desperate need of the Killer Home Recording series. You are missing the boat in about 250 areas and concepts and you are gonna waste about four years of your life chasing your own tail when you could avoid the whole mess.

The short version. The solo’d track is irrelevant. It’s like posting a picture of your transmission and asking why your car won’t start. A car is a sum of all it’s parts…a system. A mix, too, is a sum of all its parts. To put it bluntly, the guitars by themselves don’t mean a damn thing.

Red Flag #2: The Awesome Kick Problem
I remember when I had ordered my recording gear for the first time. I was listening to Skid Row’s Slave To The Grind. I said to myself, “This kick needs more beater attack. When I record I’m ALWAYS gonna have an awesome kick drum sound!”.

When I hopped into audio mixing, I quickly realized that the kick drum was the least of my problems. In fact, no single element was important because the whole thing sounded like a dead man’s balls. The mix, as a whole, was infinitely flawed. So all the sudden the notion of me nitpicking about Slave To The Grind (which is an excellent sounding hard rock record for the era) is ridiculous because the mix (and SONGS) of that record, as a whole, are quite badass.

So this over emphasis on the “awesome” nature of a single instrument is a huge problem. You’ve lost the forest for a single tree and therefor you’ll never really achieve what you are after.

Red Flag #3: Crappy Music Problem
When people post their solo’d metal guitars rarely are these guitars doing anything interesting. (It’s not that people are posting bad metal. It’s more of an issue of people looking for “tone” help usually post musically deficient crap!) Just palm muting on a low E and then hitting an F power chord every once in a while isn’t going to excite anyone. It’s a sound we’ve heard a zillion times since the first guy did it in the 50s or whatever. (Maybe not the 1950s, but you get my point.)

I’m a HUGE believer in the idea that music and engineering are ENTIRELY interdependent. They are inseparable. The best engineering in the world won’t work in a vacuum. The goosebump factor is a combination of robo music and robo presentation/aesthetic (engineering).

So going back to our stereotypical metal riff. If we were to fire up some mega drum pounding behind it and add a sick ass bass under it with the band playing tight as hell, we may start to find some excitement in there. (The thing you are REALLY looking for!) We just may find that the original guitar track sounds pretty damn good after all! Now switch your all-star drum/bass lineup to the local kids sound. (We’ll say 14 year old kids just to make it obvious.) Just by taking the tight ass playing out of the equation, but keeping the sonics exactly the same, we’ve transformed our robo production into unlistenable garbage. (This concept is also well covered in Killer Home Recording.)

The Great Recording Compromise
There is something to not stopping until you find “the sound”. It’s not a bad idea to do the best you can on a recording. In fact, that is great! However, you’ve got to set a deadline. Let’s say you’ve got a month to get your guitars done because the band wanted this recording out last month. In that time, you probably aren’t going to be blowing away or even matching the robo metal guys with 30 years of experience recording the best bands and the best rooms on the planet. That’s a given. I doubt you will dispute this.

So do your absolute very best in the time you’ve got. Finish it. Move on. Because your skill is not what it will be in a decade, don’t get too wound up about it.

I’ve never met one good engineer who was ever satisfied with his work. I’m talking about guys with Grammy Awards and Platinum records on the wall. They hear their songs on the radio and they hide to contain their embarrassment over their production. Of course, the zillion people who love the song think it’s the best thing ever. So get used to being unhappy with this elusive side. Once you get past the Objective Flaw Barrier, it’s all a damn lie anyway.

Objective Flaw Barrier
When guys post a clip on Bash This Recording or whatever, they are looking for help to improve. Some of the mixes are a little rough and need help. The things that make one mix obviously suck are what I call “objective flaws” that we all more or less agree on. There aren’t many of these types of flaws because there is a HUGE window of acceptable production on any given recording.

So if a posted guitar track has an exceptional amount of fizz and mud I may say something. If the track is out of tune I’ll DEFINITELY say something. If the tone is boxy, boring, comb filtered, or just plain crappy I’ll say something. However, once we survive through all of these checks, if I’m to critique the guitars past this point, it’s more about serving my ego than serving the music.

If you’ve got a track that survives the Objective Flaw Barrier, you are on your own. You’ve got to use your own creativity and ingenuity to push your tracks to the “next level” (as all the rappers say…ha ha). We can give tricks to try, but YOU must come up with that magic little something if you think the song really needs it. Any advice past this point gets into this “every-recording-should-sound-identical” mess where a guy thinks your Master of Puppets guitars should instead be Killswitch guitars. That kind of thing is up to you and the band. I’d never tell a guy he shouldn’t be unique!

The Damn Lie
Do you know what happens when you get the band to play outstandingly tight on great songs in great rooms where the engineer passes the Objective Flaw Barrier on every track? It’s called a major label production. It’s called a bad ass recording, too.

As you are well aware of, you probably have 2,000 mp3s on your Ipod. Maybe 20-50 tunes stand out as having extreme production that just blows your minds. So what about the other 1,950 songs? Why are they are on your Ipod? Forget that. Do they sound bad? If your recording could match the engineering level of those 1,950 songs, would you be happy? I bet you would.

So The Damn Lie is this magic spell the recording world has placed (particularly on metal music) that there is some sort of PhD in engineering where everything you record is bad ass sounding. There isn’t. Once you get passed the “don’t suck” phase, the engineering aspect means NOTHING. The music entirely takes over.

Let me explain.

I believe that engineering NEVER adds to the music. Ever! It’s never happened! It never will happen. I believe that engineering can only apply a penalty. A recording never matches the real thing. You love the Lamb of God guitar tone? If you were stand in front of the real amp, your eyes would light up like you just saw a mushroom cloud. It would be jaw dropping. The recording is good, but there is nothing like the real thing. That’s like comparing your right hand and your girlfriend. A recording is an “emulation” of real life at best.

—–
Note: I was called out on this on the forum because I was probably a little vague here. So just to clarify let me explain. I mean that if you have 100% decided that the amp can not be touched and is absolutely perfect, tossing a mic in front of that amp and playing it through your studio monitors, boom box, or Ipod is never going to have that huge 3D realism of the amp in the room. The same would apply if you had the London Symphony performing just for you. Taking a pair of super high end SDCs and placing them in X/Y stereo to capture that Symphony will never sound as bad ass and exciting as what you hear in the room.

I did not mean to imply that all records should be done live and natural. (I have way too many Nine Inch Nails and Def Leppard records for that.) I didn’t mean that the craft of producing can’t create ruckus that goes beyond what is possible in the live environment. (I always believe in “maxing out” the studio recording and dealing with the live stuff later.) My point is worshiping the sound in the room and hoping an SM57 or U47 is gonna get that pretty much always ends up in disappointment.

——

So, the only goal of engineering is to get out of the way. Maybe the best engineer in the world has found a way to let 99% of the music through. Maybe a beginning engineer assesses a great penalty to the noise. Maybe he only lets 40% of the music through. Your goal as an engineer should be to do the least damage possible to the music that’s buried in some kind of hidden dimension. When you can get out of the way enough, you are officially in major label big boy land.

The only problem is this suddenly puts a HUGE emphasis on the crap that really matters. (The musician, the song, the room, the instruments).

Good luck!

Brandon Drury

If you have a music website, list, etc and believe your members could benefit from my 13 PDF, 3GB Killer Home Recording system, contact me.

Brandon

The drums were done with Toontrack’s New York Studio Legacy Series Vol.2 SDX.

Grand Prize
Superior Drummer 2.0, New York Studio Legacy Series Vol.2 SDX, and Nashville EZX

For Rules, Track Downloads, and Details head here.

Brandon

While the kick drum used in Toontrack Mixing Wars: Metal from the Metal Foundry drum samples was recorded in a robo high end studio by a mega engineers and a super pro drummer, some people are surprised by what they here from the unprocessed drums.

Note: Toontrack intentionally left the drums unprocessed so that they could mega manipulate them using their included mixer. Take a listen to the results.

EQ On Metal Kick Drums
If you start with the stock kick drum Metal Foundry, you’ll notice it’s very heavy in the low mids and not a whole lot going on top. So, the solution to that is fairly straight forward. I pulled out a narrow band at 250Hz quite aggressively. (There are times and genres when you want plenty of 250Hz, but this wasn’t one of them at least not for my tastes.)

Then I boosted the hell out of 5k and 10k. I use more EQ here than I do on any other source EVER. I don’t feel guilty using 30dB of EQ if I need to (watch out for the bleed however, if applicable). At 10k, you’ll hear more of the death metal click. At 5k you’ll hear more “clack”. Getting the relatively balance of these right is mega crucial and something I spend some time on.

Note: Some drums have tons of attack by default and don’t need EQ. As I discuss in Killer Home Recording: Murderous Mixing, EQ is both problem solving tool and a creativity enhancing tool. So this notion of “needing” doesn’t necessarily mean the source was flawed. It simply means we want to enhance it to fulfill our creative vision.

Compression
I don’t compress the actual kick drum often. I’m sure it’s happened, but I don’t automatically start there. I use two parallel compression buses which I route directly to my standard drum bus. One bus dramatically over emphasizes attack by setting a release long enough for the peak to leap through. The other drum bus uses an super dooper fast compressor to increase the sustain. By blending these two faders we have outrageous tonal possibilities for our fake ass, over-the-top kick drum sound.

Killer Home Recording: Murderous Mixing
If you liked this little mixing tip, you MUST check out Killer Home Recording: Murderous Mixing. I’ve jam packed it full of every mixing trick, tactic, and concept I know. You’ll love it!

If you are new to audio recording and have no clue what gear you need to get started, have problems that you can’t seem to solve, or just basically don’t know what the hell you are doing, you are in luck. I just decided that I’m giving away 1/12th of my ultra mega Killer Home Recording series for free. You can have it.

I decided that way too many people have way too many problems buying their microphones, audio interfaces, recording software, studio monitors, etc. Way too many people buy the wrong gear in the first place for reasons that are rarely their fault. Even more people run into problems when they get their recording gear that they end up tearing their hair out before they get the stupid thing working.

Killer Home Recording: Setting Up is my answer to these problems. I’m positive I can save you headaches, hours of wasted time, and in many cases thousands of dollars.

The original plan was to charge $29.95 for Killer Home Recording: Setting Up.

Screw it! You can have it for free. Killer Home Recording: Setting Up.

Granted, I put on my panties (OUT OF NECESSITY!) when it was time to learn Cubase SX3 and read the entire Getting Started manual. (Some things in life are so powerful that you do actually have to sit down and read the instructions to harness the beast. [lie]I had to do the same thing when I learned how to fly an Apache helicopter.[/lie]. It’s odd how I’m all about reading (I try to read a book a week…on a good week.) but if it’s in the form of instructions I just zone out and think about horsepower, breasts, or pizza. I don’t get it.

Well, it turns out that I’ve found a new item to add to my list of powerhouses that require reading. In addition to Cubase and Apache Helicopters, I now formally induct the Distressor EL-8X compressor to the Read The Damn Instructions Club.

I’ve had the stupid thing for about a year and a half. I did the usual. I bought it. I tossed the manual in the box (to protect it from harm, of course). I hooked it up. I started pushing buttons and twisting knobs. It occurred to me in a recent session that I really had no idea what all various modes do, how they are supposed to sound, etc. I found that many of my weekend warrior bands who someday dream of having laces on their shoes aren’t overly willing to pay me to play with my compressor as much as I’d like.

It’s not that I haven’t experimented with the thing. I’ve used it day in and day out for 500 days. The problem is the Distressor has about a billion possible combinations. As you’ll see later on, different ratios cause the attack and release functions to vary and those cause the detector circuits to vary. This doesn’t even factor in the harmonic content this bad boy is so famous for. So it’s not like I’m a retard and let the thing collect dust in my closet. I’ve used the crap out of it. I just lost respect for how insanely versatile the Distressor is.

So, I called myself Brandy for a few minutes and fired up the manual for the Distressor EL-8X.
I considered putting on lip stick, too, but I couldn’t a color that matched my dress.

Epiphany Time
I was tracking vocals last night for the Toontrack Mixing Wars: Country contest. I had a situation to play with my new found knowledge. I was DEVESTATED by all the power in this unit I’ve been missing. Simply put, all that sibilant crap I’ve been fighting on mixes lately could have been avoided entirely if I would have just opened up the manual.

The function I’m talking about is the Detector circuit. Basically, the Detector works much like a sidechain. Inside the Distressor the signal is split. One side is the audio side. The other is the detector side. We can manipulate the detector side to control how the audio side gets hammered with compression. (If you need help with this one, just post on the audio recording forum and we’ll explain it in greater detail)

There are two included detector modes in the Distressor. One is the low cut. This knocks down the low end being fed to our detector and therefor means the low end stuff won’t have much effect on how the signal as a whole is squashed. An 808 kick drum bass drum thing isn’t as likely to cause the entire mix to clamp down and pump.

To quote the Distressor Manual:

Low cut keeps the low “sum & difference” frequencies from pumping the upper frequencies of source material.

In English, that means that low end won’t screw up your mid and top end. The Distressor is not listening to the low end to decide how it is going to compress the audio signal.

The function that I DRAMATICALLY underestimated was the other detector mode. It boosts the crap out of the upper midrange on the detector. This means the Distressor is going to be more aggressive towards fighting upper midrange frequencies.

In Use
I normally like to start with relatively conservative settings (much like recommended in the manual) with attack and release on 5. I’ve been having fun with the 6:1 ratio lately and trying to set the Distressor so it’s hitting 1dB of reduction most of the time and taming the super loud peaks. This is a good overall setting for compression if there aren’t any other pressing issues. It’s just a nice little “evener”.

However, when ol’ Slasher Sibilance arrives, we’ve got a new problem. We have “essess” leaping out and we have to do something about it. My self study in audio engineering (the thing I’m paying attention to in recordings this month) is the lack of ANY sibilance in 99.9% of all big boy recordings. So the goal for this one was to need no de-essing on the lead vocal.

I must admit that I’ve played with the upper mid boost detector button before. In fact, I ruined a recording of a vocal about a year ago because I had the detector button on but squashed the living hell out of rest of the track. (I saw Michael Wagener commonly use 18dB of reduction with his Distressor on vocals at his work shop and was curious. I clearly wasn’t doing it right!) So I’ve been careful with that mid boost detector. Overall, I’ve considered it to be a fairly subtle effect….until last night.

Our sibilance wasn’t world ending, but it was not the zero sibilance sound I’m looking for with the Distressor in “normal” setting. Pressing the mid boost detector button didn’t do much at first because my attack was a little slow. I have no idea how fast “5” is on a Distressor but it will definitely let sibilance through. However, by pushing the attack down to 1 or .5 something magical happened. The Distressor said “Goodbye sibilance!”. The vocal wasn’t remotely dull. It didn’t get that fake sounding lisp thing you often get with de-essers. It just sounded like the damn thing is supposed to. Impressive! I came extremely close to the zero-sibilance sound I was after. I’ll take it!

The secret was the detector, the fast attack, fairly aggressive ratio (6:1), and only hitting the signal hard enough to catch these sibilant peaks. If I would have hit the vocal with 18dB of compression, I’m positive that I would have killed much of the good stuff in the upper range of the vocal. (Which is what I did in the ruined vocal tale above.) If I would have slowed the attack down the sibilance would have snuck right through. Who knows what would have happened with a different ratio!…or British mode!….or the Distortion modes!

As you can see there are a billion settings that are interdependent on the Distressor.

Conclusion
This wasn’t meant to be a full blown review of the Distressor EL-8x. I just wanted to highlight what an awesome tool the Distressor is for knocking sibilance off vocals. I’ll be using it for this feature from here on out. Impressive! Maybe when I have about 10 or 15 of these mega tricks figured out I can actually do a full blown review of it.

We still have a few days left for an exciting contest that will definitely help you improve your metal mixing chops, give you more perspective of what goes into metal recording and production on the tracking side, and get feedback from us Gestapo Committee members here at Recording Review on specifically how to improve your mix.

All the while, you’ll have a chance to win a mega package from Toontrack! The winner will be snagging Superior Drummer 2.0 , Drum Kit From Hell, and Metal Foundry.

Metal recording and mixing has a handful of specialized tactics (particularly on kick drum mixing) that most of genres don’t have to deal with. By jumping in and going to town on a mix that all of the Gestapo Committee members have already got their faders on, we can help in ways that actually crush that of Bash This Recording, which WAS my go to method for improving the sound of your recordings.

When you download the big ol’ zip file you’ll get all drum tracks (exported from Metal Foundry), one bass DI, 5 guitar tracks, and a vocal track. So this contest is a great way to hone your metal mixing chops on guitars, bass, drums, and vocals. (Technically, they are all part of the same thing) but for beginners there can be huge value in breaking them up just a bit.

For those of you new to compressor and equalizer techniques, you’ll be able find out what techniques are working for you and what mixing tactics aren’t working. There couldn’t be a better “how to mix” guide.

You’ll also hear problems and flaws in my tracking that need to be sorted out at mix time. By seeing how the best sounding mixes turned out and asking those Recording Review members for help on specifically how they did it, you can acquire a ton of knowledge right off the bat. This is an opportunity that doesn’t come around much so make sure you hop on it as soon as possible.

Head here for Rules, Downloads, and Prizes.

The last day to enter the contest is Sunday, Jan 3, 2010.

Also keep an eye out for Toontrack Mixing Wars: Country in January and Toontrack Mixing Wars: Techno in February.

If you have any questions or comments about Toontrack Mixing Wars: Metal feel free to post on the forum or contact me personally.

Make sure to check out other entries in the Toontrack Mixing Wars: Metal contest so you can see how others approached mixing the heavy metal song and you can gain perspective and ideas as to how to handle your own mix. In the contest category you’ll see that I’ve included the MIDI files so you can run your kick, snares, toms through other drum samples. I’ve also included the DI guitar files so you can reamp the guitars or use your favorite guitar emulator plugin

Brandon

The Manley TNT is a high dollar unit, to say the least. Well, even expensive gear has problems some times. I contacted Manley to let them know I was having a problem. I shipped the TNT to them their shop and what do you know? They can’t find the problem. It appears that it is intermittent.

We’ve all dealt with tech repair situations that had intermittent problems. This ALWAYS blows. In a big ol’ chunk of those cases you end up screwed. Well, the Manley dude told me straight up, that they weren’t going to give up. They had their tricks and they’d find the damn problems.

It took ‘em almost a month (which was fine by me), but they eventually found the culprit. There was a problem with a capacitor.

It’s nice dealing with a tech support where you know you are being taken care of. I don’t know how much time they spent on my Manley TNT, but I’m guessing it was significant. While you’d expect high end support from such a high end company, you never really know for sure what you are going to get.

I have to say that I couldn’t recommend Manley gear any higher based on both the quality of their products and their dedication to taking care of you when problems occur…..including the dreaded intermittent crap.

Well done, Manley!

Brandon