Neve 32404
A module that spent its working life buried in a console frame. It only makes sense once you know what it was doing there.
Overview
The 32404 is not a product in the way most people mean the word. It is a Neve console module, specifically an eight-auxiliary module, the kind that filled out the routing and send architecture of large Neve desks. It has no front panel to admire, no VU meter to watch, no knobs you'd recognize from a rack unit. Big consoles needed aux sends, and Neve built a card to provide them.
The most complete picture of the module comes from the classified pages of Studio Sound in the mid-1990s, when UK broker A.E.S. Pro Audio was moving Neve consoles and pulling modules out of them.
Those listings put the module inside the 8058 and related Neve frames of the era. The 32404 let those channels feed effects sends and cue mixes. It's the part of the console nobody photographs.
Collectors chasing a 32404 today are almost always after a spare or a replacement for a console restoration. The module turns up as loose stock far more often than as part of a complete desk, and the classified record from 1994-1996 shows it moving in lots of a dozen or two at a time. It is a component, priced as a component, and its value tracks how many 8058s and 8036s are still being kept alive.
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