TL Audio's M4 Tube Console has received an exceptional review in TapeOp magazine by Roland St. John Perez.

Here is the review in full:

'I own a pretty good assortment of high-end outboard preamps, EQs, and compressors—Neve, Millennia, Summit, and so forth. While waiting for my M4 to arrive after placing the order, I began to doubt the ability of the console's preamps and EQs to match those in my racks.

Upon delivery, when I piped a few instruments through the M4 for the first time and had the band go through an improv jam, I realized all was indeed well. It's always hard to describe in detail what preamps and EQs really sound like, but if I were to grab a few words at the top of my head, the sound is elegant, smooth, detailed, and HUGE!!!!!!!

When set properly, the preamps can handle any source with clarity and class. When pushed to the point of tube saturation (as every channel has a tube), awesome harmonic distortion occurs; musical saturation for which I always ran to my Summit TPA 200B is on every channel! If you are worried about tubes adding excess noise on a channel, much less 24 channels, let me say that the M4 is very quiet even when I push it to the limits of the preamps. Wonderful. The imaging on this thing is very sweet. It made me realize in an instant why mixing on a console is important. Tracks have better placement in the stereo field. Effects on tracks are more detailed. Mixes simply come to life. You can definitely hear the 'tube' in this console, but I have to say it's a very musical and workable sound. I had read in some forum that the posting user found the preamps to lack headroom, but I personally find the preamps to handle all levels and all sources extremely well, including acoustic and electric guitars, bass, synths, drums, and drum machines.

These EQs respond differently than any other console EQ I have used (as well as outboard for that matter)! They can defiantly handle and sweeten any signal and make the track better by far, but no matter how much I boost or cut, the original source is never demolished. If I boost the HF by 7 8 dB, the result is still smooth and transparent. These EQs were designed to be used and abused. I find myself doing some pretty radical EQs to my tracks, and everything sounds amazing. Again, elegant and smooth come to mind. Phase distortion and the 'grainy' trademarks of other console EQs I've used are simply not evident. What is evident is clarity with color!'

Further Links

• TL Audio M4 Product pages
• TL Audio M1-F Product pages
• All TL Audio News