Grace Design Model 101
A half-rack, single-channel preamp that took the architecture of Grace's flagship 801 and squeezed it into a box anyone with a part-time job could afford.
Overview
The Model 101 is a single-channel, solid-state, half-rack microphone preamp. It has a fully balanced, transformerless mic input and a high-impedance instrument input. Grace Design priced it at $699, and the pitch, repeated across the company's own advertising, was blunt: the "ultimate microphone preamplifier for under $1,000." That kind of copy usually earns an eye-roll from reviewers, but the press corps largely declined to roll. EQ (July 2001, p.116) described the 101 as sharing heritage with the high-end Model 801 and Model 201 while landing at a price realistic for project studios. Pro Audio Review (December 2001, p.40) noted the company had spent roughly a decade building high-performance, high-dollar preamps before deliberately pushing into three-digit territory with this one.
The build is sturdy and, by most accounts, handsome. The chrome front panel has the same rounded, retro-modern contours as the 801 and 201, and reviewers have been known to complain that it practically begs to be smudged with fingerprints. The all-metal chassis is solid for a half-rack unit.
The front panel is sparse and clearly labeled, left to right: a ¼-inch high-impedance DI jack marked HIZ, a 48V phantom-power switch, large Gain and Trim knobs, a 75 Hz highpass-filter switch, and a power switch beneath a recessed amber indicator. A second recessed bulb near the top center glows green at signal presence of -20 dBu and above, then turns red at +16 dBu, a conservative 9 dB below clipping. One reviewer likened the effect to brake lights on a chrome bumper.
The Gain control is the interesting part. Rather than a linear pot, Grace fitted a precision stepped-gain switch with 11 positions, each detent worth 5 dB, taking the mic input from 10 dB up to 60 dB. There are no intermediate calibration marks, so repeatable settings mean counting clicks. That's a small price for channel-to-channel consistency. The continuously variable Trim control handles the sub-5 dB moves, running from unity at fully clockwise down to 10 dB of attenuation at its lowest setting. A high-output variant of the 101, with a 20 to 70 dB range, was offered for ribbon mics and other quiet sources.
The numbers behind the mic input are the ones that sold this box. Grace rated frequency response at 40 dB gain as 12 Hz to 170 kHz (-3 dB), a bandwidth that extends, as one reviewer put it, into realms only dogs and test gear can appreciate. At the high-impedance input, response at 20 dB gain is 3 Hz to 300 kHz (-3 dB) with a 50 dB gain range. The 12 dB/octave highpass filter slopes to -3 dBU at 75 Hz, and THD+N is quoted at 0.005% at 60 dB. Grace's design keeps electrolytic capacitors out of the signal path entirely. The XLR input and output connectors are gold-plated Neutrik parts, a balanced ¼-inch TRS output sits alongside them, and both actively balanced outputs can be used simultaneously.
Power comes from an external 6V wall-wart transformer. Reviewers grumbled about it, and Grace's defense was reasonable: an internal toroidal transformer and linear supply would have made the unit larger and more expensive. The company also insisted the supplied wart was a cut above the generic article.
Two omissions draw consistent complaint. There is no polarity-reverse switch, a feature Grace includes on the 801 and 201. One studio engineer kept a pin-2-to-pin-3 cable within reach throughout testing for multiple-mic setups and older gear. More irritating is the absence of an indicator lamp on the phantom-power switch, and the front panel's sculpting makes the 48V switch position hard to read at a glance. Neither flaw caused an actual mishap in review, but both are the sort of thing owners notice every session.
Sonically, the 101's reputation rests on transparency. Reviewers repeatedly reached for the "wire with gain" ideal, and Pro Audio Review (December 2001, p.41) drew a direct comparison to a favorite solid-state preamp on exactly those grounds. In practice that meant a preamp that could be merciless. Paired with a bright tube mic on one singer, its flat response exposed a sibilance problem that a warmer transformer preamp masked. On a different voice in the same room, the same chain opened up beautifully. On DI duty it earned particular praise. It was cleaner and quieter than other preamp/DI boxes in one reviewer's rack, with crisp upper harmonics and unusually well-articulated low end, though slightly less thick through the 150-300 Hz midbass octave than fatter-sounding competitors.
The verdict from the period press was close to unanimous. EQ (July 2001, p.116) framed the whole product around accuracy, and an Electronic Musician write-up concluded that the modest single-channel unit outperforms any other preamp in its price range and offers serious competition even to legendary models costing three and four times as much.
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