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14-day money back guarantee included if product is not activated
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For more information, please refer to our Returns and Refunds Information.
If you decide your order isn't suitable for any reason you can return it - just let us know within 50 days of receiving it. Please keep hold of all the original packaging until you're sure you want to keep the order.
Eligibility for Money Back Guarantee
Important: For hygiene and software licensing reasons, some items are only eligible for our Money Back Guarantee if they are returned to us unused and sealed in the original packaging with all software still "unregistered." Details of exclusions are shown within the product descriptions. Products include:
- Monitors and Headphones
- Earplugs and Ear Protection
- Reeds and mouthpieces for woodwind and brass instruments
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We can collect your return for a small fee, or you can send it back to us yourself. The collection fee can be found in the returns information on each product's page on Gear4music.
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This table provides an overview of your statutory consumer rights, compared with our standard returns policy and optional extended money back guarantee and warranty.
| UK & Europe | EU Standard | Gear4music Standard | Gear4music Optional |
|---|---|---|---|
| Return Period | 14 days | 50 days | up to 180 days |
| Standard delivery charges refunded? | Yes | Yes | Yes, up to 30 days |
| Upgraded delivery charges refunded? | Standard costs only | Standard costs only | Standard costs only |
| Free collection on cancellation | No | No | Yes, up to 30 days |
| Free collection if defective, delivered damaged or incorrect item | Yes, within 14 days | Yes, within 14 days | Yes, within 30 days |
We are unable to accept returns of any custom made items designed to work together as a unique package and some items are only eligible for money back guarantee if they are returned to us unused and sealed in the original packaging. For full information on our returns policy, please refer to our returns and refunds information guide.
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Key Features
The Arturia 1973-Pre is a plug-in emulation of a world-famous British-made preamplifier. The brainchild of audio legend Rupert Neve, the Arturia 1973-Pre aims to deliver the unmistakable flavour, distortion and character of the preamp, enhanced with modern addendums to meet the demands of modern producers. Brought to life by revolutionary TAE analog-modelling technologies, 1973-Pre delivers subtle vintage lift and harmonic enhancement for your productions.
Adorned with the traditional controls you'd find, 1973-Pre features a three-band EQ to sculpt and shape the tone of your track along with input and output controls to adjust the level of saturation. Augmented for modern producers, Arturia has introduced clever features to improve functionality including left/right and mid/side operation with independent control over each channel, continuous controls for more precise settings and automatic gain matching for input and output stages. With all this at your disposal, you can inject your tracks with the sound of one of musics' most iconic tones directly in your DAW.
Product Ref: 254465
It wouldn't be out of the question to wonder how a virtual preamp could benefit your productions, considering your recordings have gone through preamps in the first place. Advances in modern technology results in preamps with a very neutral and transparent sound, imparting little or no tonal character in favour of providing a perfectly clean slate on which your sound can be altered later.
Vintage preamps were designed to imprint a sonic signature, subtly adding distortion and other desirable traits to colour the sound in pleasing ways. Now available in virtual plug-in form, you can impart the tonal characteristics of vintage preamps to your modern digital recordings even after it's already been recorded, giving you the best of both worlds!
What looks from the outside a simple unit to come to grips with, the tonal enhancement and character the 1973-Pre imparts into your tracks is undeniable. Its simplicity is part of the appeal, letting users of all abilities discover sound-shaping abilities without needing to crack a menu or trawl through endless menus.
The most desirable attribute of the 1973-Pre is unquestionably the saturation and drive you can get, mimicking the sound of hardware preamps pushed to their limits. With +60dB of virtual gain, you can drive even the weakest signal sources into searing saturation. At lower levels, you'll find the input gain presents a flattering brilliance on the top end but when pushed to its limit, it will introduce harmonic distortion and fatness to your tone.
Just like the original, Arturia have kept the three-band EQ onboard to let you creatively shape your signal with distinctive analog flavour and tone. A fixed high-frequency shelf filter offers +/-18dB of gain at 12kHz, featuring an aggressive character with a wide Q-factor to add brightness and cut to even the dullest vocal or snare drum.
At the other end of the spectrum, a low-frequency shelf filter ranges from 35 - 220Hz with a range of +/-18dB. Ideal for carving excessive sub from a bass guitar to sit better in the mix or for adding punch to the low notes of your piano recordings for added weight and density.
A semi-parametric midrange bell filter spans 360Hz - 7.2kHz with a range of +/-18dB, enabling you to fine-tune the midrange of just about any instrument, regardless of the fundamental frequency.
To top it all off, Arturia has even recreated the vintage style of the interface in a glorious, high-definition GUI. Every aspect of the Pre-1973 has been meticulously put together, ready to take your music to the next level.
Technology moves on, but that doesn't mean that we need to forget the pieces that got us where we are today. In fact, in the 50 years since its release, still, nothing quite sounds the same or has the same X-factor as vintage hardware preamps. The needs of musicians and producers may have changed, but the end goal hasn't - and that's getting the best sound from your tracks.
To bring the 1973-Pre up to date with the expectations of modern users, Arturia have added a small number of enhancements to get the most from the preamp in your DAW. Continuous controls have been implemented in favour of stepped parameters, letting you mix between the lines, improving the precision in everything you do. Whether that's finding the perfect frequency for your EQ move or dialling the precise amount of input gain, you now have more control.
Citing gain levels, 1973-Pre now includes automatic gain controls to perfectly match the input and output levels depending on your adjustments, ensuring that you hear only the tonal changes rather than changes in volume.
Two switches have been employed, one to control the virtual transformer type and the other for stereo mode. Two transformer types are included, one modelling the original Carnhill transformers, the other offering a modern alternative, recreating the sound of modified Marinair components so often found in these preamps. Self-contained, the Stereo switch lets you swap between mid/side and left/right processing at the push of a button.
Renowned for their expertise in the recreation of vintage synthesizers and keyboards, Arturia has plied their trade in creating plug-ins of legendary audio. Putting the indistinguishable sound of this classic device into your DAW at a fraction of the cost, Arturia painstakingly analysed each component, part and response of the hardware original to deliver a living, breathing emulation.
Working with an original, unmodified preamp built in 1971, Arturia have matched the hardware in every way. This specific unit has been heard on iconic Blur and Gorillaz records and can now take right of place as the first plug-in in your mix to give it the extra edge, warmth and character you've come to love from vintage hardware.
Using proprietary modelling algorithms, 1973-Pre can recreate the iconic hardware down to the component parts to create unrivalled realism and immersion. Unmatched in analog emulation, 1973-Pre is powered by TAE and Phi technologies. TAE offers component-level modelling to accurately present the characteristics and behaviour of the hardware, whilst Phi's state-of-the-art physical modelling brings the acoustic properties into the virtual world for hyper-realism. The result is truly a next-level sound that is indistinguishable from the original to add to your productions.
"The Pre-1973 has such a characteristic tone, it works wonderfully on drums and adds warmth and tone to vocal recordings. It's a must-use for me during tracking." - Alicia Light (Recording Engineer)
Indinstinguishable recreation of hardware preamp, encompassing all analog anomalies and character
