Meet my new toy, CL-2 Cloudlifter! Clips inside.

[JakeAC5253]

Just arrived today so I wanted to give it a quick run to test it out. The CL-2 is an inline gain boost for mic level signal that touts that it has no series resistance so as to not increase noise. The box gives a passive (don't kill me for word choice) 20-25dB boost and runs on Phantom power. It supposedly does two things: a. shows dynamic/ribbon mics the "correct" impedance that they should see to produce maximum quality sound and b. buffers and amplifies the signal for higher S/N and for quiet source recording so you can run your pres lower and still get higher fidelity. Condensers would not need something like this unless they need a clean gain boost seeing as how condensers have similar circuitry built into them. Plus it has JFETs in it, and if you know me, you know how much I love JFETs! I bought it for a ribbon microphone that I just ordered, but I also use dynamics on a regular basis, so I figure it's never a bad thing to have around so long as it sounds good. Testing will determine that...


The guitar rig is not setup at the moment so I decided to do just a quick vocal test instead. This is not the most scientific test due to the nature of vocal recording and all the variables that affect the tone, but I still think it's neat. Sorry it's not awesome brutal tones yet, I'm working on it... There are three recordings, bare mic through a 15' cable straight to the preamps of my M-Audio Profire 2626, mic through a 15' cable to the CL-2 then through a 3' cable into my Profire, and mic through a 3' cable to the CL-2 then through a 15' cable to my Profire. Basically just giving it the runaround, what I hope to do by this test is determine whether the impedance loading effect of the unit is lesser or greater than the buffer effect. Here I'm just using some of my favorite vocal dynamics:





I'm going to perform the test again when I get my ribbon mic in a week or so.

 

[RedDog]

Whoa, even on the 58, there's a subtle, but detectable difference.

 

[JakeAC5253]

Whoa, even on the 58, there's a subtle, but detectable difference.

Yeah no doubt. The thing that impressed me was that even though each take was tracked at the same level to within .1dB, the CL-2 tracks had to be lowered after tracking so that they were the same audible level. The second of each clip, which is the mic > 15' cable > CL-2 > 3' cable had to be lowered by 1dB to match with the non-CL-2 track. The last of each clip, which was the mic > 3' cable > CL-2 > 15' cable had to be lowered 2dB to be at the same level.

I even retracked a few of these takes thinking something weird happened that wasn't completely controlled, but it came out the same. Pretty cool. That means to me that with the CL-2, the recordings have more tonal presence per unit dB, which is a pretty cool thing! Maybe some subtle JFET compression.

 

[nialldoran]

awesome im looking forward to a few more tests with this box we could really use one at the studio, we have a few ribbons and low output dynamics, especially our pair of fatheads.