Neve 5315/24
A console that shows up in the record mostly as furniture - the desk a Calrec Soundfield and a Neumann U47 happened to be sitting on when someone pressed record.
Overview
The Neve 5315/24 is hard to pin down in an encyclopedia entry. It's a large-format desk, and a desk like that doesn't perform. It hosts. This one hosted a serious microphone comparison.
What the surviving documentation does establish is the input stage. The manufacturer specifies the nominal microphone input impedance of the 5315/24 as 1.2 kohms, transformer-coupled, balanced and floating, as noted in a 1984 exchange in Recording-Engineer (August 1984, p.14). In the same exchange, the engineer running the sessions says the nominal input impedance for microphones in each transformer-coupled channel amplifier is 1,200 ohms. Every microphone evaluated was matched into that load, including vintage ribbon and tube condensers rated in the 150- to 250-ohm range, following the standard practice of loading a source at least four to five times its rated impedance. So the front end was stiff enough not to drag down a low-impedance ribbon. That's what you want from a console used to evaluate microphones rather than flatter them.
Input gain on the desk was set at 45dB for the reference pair and the Beyer MC740s during that session, with the ambisonic system run at 0dB off its own line-level control unit. That's a working number, not a spec-sheet headline. It does show the console had enough clean gain to bring up quiet condensers in a concert hall without outboard help. The same account records that the hall's air-handling noise, measured in the NC15 to 20 range, completely masked the self-noise of all five microphones in the comparison. The room's HVAC was louder than the mic noise floor, so the desk wasn't adding noise that mattered.
Beyond that, the record is thin. No production years, no original price, no channel count beyond what the "/24" in the model number implies, no documented maintenance history, no market data. The archive has the 5315/24 as a documented working console with a confirmed transformer-coupled 1.2 kohm mic input and a confirmed presence in at least one professionally documented recording project.
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