ALTO Professional- Voice Plus (Legacy Product)

CoolCat

Well-known member
Decent write ups though very few, a short lived product it seems. $45...Very Good shape why not?

Very impressed with the build, heavy with very large transformer in it for power, extremely clean layout internally.
Brushed aluminum front with excellent pots, tight and firm not the plastic cheapo feeling kind, these are 100%.

Not totally dissecting it, supposedly BurrBrown ic's , YAC caps from what I can tell. No country of origin but the writing on the back is French..er...Italian? InMusic is the Large Corp which now owns Rane and Denon and many others...

Unit looks brand new, so it wasn't used or the silk screen is well done. XLR are gold plated, standard power plug no wall wart. SPEC is -100db on the Recording Output and -80db on the Main which sounds impressive.

Oddly, the Gain....its not a ISA One with 80db, this one is closer to a Cloudlifter range 30db, maybe with some extra gain on the compressor , adding to the Mic Preamp and Master output.

As with most IC stuff I will assume "clean" and not color. No Transformer in the path nor tubes.

Test drive this weekend....:guitar:
 

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Looks interesting! Looking forward to hearing how you get on with it.
I think the gain may actually be 60db range but I guess you'll know for sure the moment you hook a mic up.

Thanks for sharing!
 
Youre right....thats good news. I didnt read the manual , just looked at the panel and saw 12db..

When the LINE switch is engaged, the input signal can
be varied from -12dB to +12dB, otherwise, the input signal can be varied from 10dB to 60dB.
 
well sometimes theres no need for much time spent on something and the Alto Voice Plus, for me...is this time.
I plugged in a dynamic and it was shrill, thin, anemic sounding no matter what I did.
So I tried the KSM27 and there was a honk-nasal cavity sound for my 2 cents.

to sanity check my ears, I ran a ART TPS track and a LA610 track and the ALTO was unplugged.

If I compare the ALTO to plugin's, or the Symetrix 528E(very good), or the Focusrite platinum stuff(similar to Alto)…or the ART Voice Channel.... the ALTO would be at the bottom of my choices.

Though it had the same knobs and features as the Symetrix 528E, there was a easy decision to remove it from the rack as I don't see a me ever needing it. ALTO is similar in sound to the Focusrite silver platinum line though not as good. The Synmetrix 528E is still a professional real deal piece for these kind of gear pieces....expander, mic pre, comp, eq etc...

PLugins would probably be better with my Line6 UX w/ realtime plug's.

I feel like I just listened to cheap crap. ..no offense meant, ymmv


addition 9hrs later....>
woke up fresh ears, and this unit playback was still pretty blah imo.

I did hook it up as one would a Cloudlifter, into a Mic Preamp on the interface using the Recording Output, and there was obviously more gain and allowed to set things in the 50%-70% volume area which seems a better way to use this ALTO VP.

The messing with ALTO VP EQ and all that isn't probably something Id want to track with and the compression is kind of muffled, the expander/gate is noticeable but sucks, nothing like the excellent Symetrix or even a plugin. Its priced for a beginner level and that's cool a person could learn what all the parts do....maybe it works better with a keyboard or something else? but it says Voice Plus and so I assume its a 528E SYmetrix type unit, the ALTO VP for $45 (or $169new before being made obsolete).

Compared to the Dual channel ART TPS this ALTO unit doesn't have the "studio" sparkle, instead its more like the sound of the million of bad youtubes in where the person uses some cheapo plastic thin sounding mic, but while the ART TPS can be very close to the LA610 in a preset way..... the ALTO doesn't.

off to Guitar Center to see if I can trade it for some cables or something. The Alto VP looks good and has nice knobs.
 
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I enjoy the gear.....for $45 its amazing the connectors and xlr and the power supplys done so well.

Someone more talented than I, with some pcb REVIVE type upgrade components would have better ideas at what makes this anemic, thin?

Reminds me a lot of the sound of the lower end Focusrite silver preamp channel strip I had tried, its IC clean but thin? Where something like the RANE or GRACE Design is IC clean but has a very full , clarity sound?


ADD> Sold at GC for $25
File under: Cheap Crap
 
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