Grace Design Lunatec V2
A half-rack portable mic preamp that brought the transparency of Grace's studio models into the field. Location recordists paid well for it.
Overview
Lift a Lunatec V2 out of its case and the first thing you notice is how much preamp Grace Design packed into a half-rack machined aluminum chassis. It's a portable location mic preamp built around the solid-state transimpedance circuitry that made the company's Models 201 and 801 studio preamps their reputation. It runs from 6-12V DC, so a wall wart or a battery pack will power it. Grace Design announced the V2 as its move into location recording.
The twin-channel layout is well thought out. Each channel has individually switched 48V phantom power (or 12V parallel power as an alternative), an 11-position precision gain control switch stepping from 10dB to 60dB in 5dB increments, and a trim control providing 10dB of continuous attenuation. Peak LEDs show green at -14dBu and red at +16dBu, and each channel has a switchable high-pass filter. The rest of the front panel is a mains switch and LEDs for power-on and low-battery condition. Studio Sound (August 1999, p.38) reviewed the unit and noted the one apparent omission - a phase reverse switch - while praising how thoroughly the design covered everything else.
The filters aren't a generic high-pass. They use a transitional Thompson-Butterworth response in a 12dB/octave configuration, which designer Michael Grace chose for the best combination of pass-band flatness and phase accuracy. Each channel has a 3-position toggle on the front panel giving either 50Hz and 100Hz or 75Hz and 125Hz cut-off frequencies, selected by the position of a pair of internal jumpers. Further internal jumpers set the filter slopes to 6dB/octave or 12dB/octave and enable the M-S decoder.
The M-S decoding is what separates the V2 from a straight two-channel preamp. In M-S mode, Channel 1 provides the sum signal and so carries the central element of the stereo image. Channel 2 provides the difference, so the Channel 2 gain control effectively controls image width: more difference signal fed to the decoder matrix widens the image. Studio Sound (August 1999, p.38) found the Lunatec could not have been easier to use in this mode.
On the connectivity side, a single 4-pin XLR on the rear panel handles power, and the rest of the rear carries balanced input XLRs, balanced output XLRs, and unbalanced output phonos that are active simultaneously — handy when feeding both a DAT deck and a monitoring path at once. The quoted frequency response runs 6Hz–250kHz with phase deviation under 8°, and the noise figure is quoted at -130dB at 60dB gain referred to input. Those are studio-grade numbers in a box you can carry to a concert taping gig.
That clean performance is also the thing that will rule the V2 out for some buyers. Studio Sound (August 1999, p.38) put it plainly: the Lunatec exhibits the same clean and open qualities that separated the Model 801 and 201 from the crowd, the noise is very low, and the transparent circuit topology lends a sense of ease to the sound. But some preamps are chosen precisely for their "sound" in a particular application, and if coloration is what you're after, the reviewer's advice was to pass the Lunatec over.
When the V2 arrived it listed at $1495 US, roughly $400 less than the older Model 201. For that saving you got M-S decoding, filters, and battery operation on top of the two channels of mic preamplification the 201 offered for a studio outboard rack. Studio Sound (August 1999, p.38) conceded it was still not cheap, but nor did it sound or perform as if it were. The V2 also turned up among the nominations in the outboard preamp category of Studio Sound's 1999 awards roundup (April 1999), listed alongside the CLM Dynamics DB200S, dbx 786, Neotek MicMax, PreSonus M80, and tc electronic Gold Channel.
The V2 is the model that established Grace's portable line before the V3 added a 24-bit/192kHz A/D converter section while retaining the V2's performance and feature set, as reported in the Mix AES 2002 New Products Guide. The V2 has no converter in it, and it's built on the same transimpedance topology as the studio models. Buyers should expect to hunt for the original battery pack and wall wart, since the unit's power comes through that single 4-pin XLR and nothing else. They should also check the internal jumpers, which a previous owner may have moved from the factory configuration for a different filter slope or M-S setup.
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