Avalon 737 Reading in Jacked... Help!

vineband

vineband

nothing but a harp
I have the pleasure of having a client that has rented some really good gear for a week long vocal session we began today. We rented a Avalon 737 preamp (purple version) and a very old Telefunken U-47. Amazing overall... thank you God for an opportunity to use this stuff! I know it takes a while to learn gear and i was hoping some experience could push me along.

Here are some problems that i am having.

The mic is temperamental. There is some serious low hum that occurs every couple house that is remedied with a light wiggle of some cables and a tap on the body of the mic. This sort of thing happens in the course of a lifetime with electronic things so its seems OK, but needless to say i am nervous as hell. (yes i have great cables and plugged the thing in in the right order). Do old expensive mics just do random crazy things every once in while? After a few hours does the mic just need a rest?


The preamp sounds decent (not nearly as well as i was hoping... my $350 ARTstrip is a close 2nd). When metering the output the needle pretty much stays between the -20 to -10 mark max. Shouldn't i be reading much hotter than this. No variable (gain, output, compression, eq) seems to change the outcome. It sounds good. But i wonder if it should sound so much better than it does already. This preamp has seen better days... could it just be limp?
 
It's a really tough call with older gear like that. Tehre are cetainly a lot of things that can go wrong. A telefunken U47 should be very old. If it has not been maintained well, it could certinly exhibit some odd functions. A purple Avalon 737 is also pretty old, and is the original that people typically see as not wquite as nice as the newer ones:(
 
Yeah, my gut tells me there is something wrong with the Avalon??? but then again my gut tells me that i always blame the equipment when i don't understand how it functions exactly, and then three days later praise the gear for it's performance.
 
The Avalon may need to be re-tubed. The pruple version is definitely several years old and the tubes are only good for 3-5 thousand hours, easily exceeded in a couple of years of heavy use. The lack of gain seems to indicate this. The U47 is definitely old and it sounds like there may be a grounding issue caused by a dirty or loose connection. It needs to be serviced. This could be a safety issue too as the cable carries a couple hundred volts to the tube in the mic if I'm not mistaken.
 
Avalon and Blue are made by the same manufacturer. Maybe that's why. And it's not the tubes. Is the "SP" in Avalon that makes the difference.
 
...

The sp is a huge help...read at www.mercenary.com for more, however, the tubes probably are playing into it quite a bit. The combo is great, I've used it before, but with a newer Vt737sp. Good luck!
 
The "SP" does make a difference due to a better transformer. When tubes get old, they get weak, ie reduced gain and increased noise. And Avalon and Blue are not owned by the same folks.
 
mind...read my post. I did not say owned. And tubes won't give you low gain. Noise, pops, yes. But not low gain.

And Blue...you look very firm on what you don't know. Why is that?
 
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