The MBC 1U Rack is everything you’re looking for. Known as one of the most gifted analogue audio circuit designers of all time, Mr. Rupert Neve’s name is now in a digital angle. Designed to lay at the end of your mixing or mastering chain, the Ruper Neve Designs Master Buss Compressor, or MBC, is a stereo conversion, limiting, and saturation packed in a 1U Rack. It can convert stereo analogue inputs into digital audio, via a stereo limiter, a transformer and RND’s proprietary Silk saturation circuitry. In the first stage, the audio will meet the limiter.
MBC 1U Rack: a Description
The MBC 1U Rack can run in a dual-mono stereo linked mode. It features control to make up gain, threshold release, and a switchable sidechain high-pass filter that has a frequency range of 20 to 250 Hz. In addition, an eight-LED ladder meter lets you know how much gain reduction the limiter is applying.
Moreover, you can engage or bypass the transformer you as desire. When engaged, you can also select from one of two flavors of Silk circuitry in Red or Blue. These offer different mixes of odd or even harmonic saturation. You can continuously vary the degree of Silk saturation using the Texture knob. Similarly, you can bypass it, in which case the transformer operates in a clean, linear fashion. Now, with a disengaged transformer, the audio passes through a Class-A transformerless circuit. Particularly, engineers designed this for maximum transparency. Lastly, the final stage is the D-A conversion. RND tells us it has minimal phase distortion and has extremely low jitter thanks to a high-quality internal clock.
You can also clock it to other gear if you require. The MBC’s mastering credentials are its twin 22-segment output level meters, which are calibrated to show the precise pre-conversion levels. You also have the ability to select from four different alignments for +4dBu (-20, -18 -16 or -14 dBFS).
