Review: Retro Powerstrip

I’ve had the Retro Powerstrip in my studio for about a month now and I have to say it’s one of those rare boxes that makes the recording and mixing process easier…. a whole lot easier! You want to make a vocal stand up and take centre stage? Give it some super smooth top end presence with premium quality valve EQ, then add 4 to 7dB of creamy tube compression at one of the medium time constant settings. Want to make your kick drum sound beefy and sweet at the same time? Work the bottom end contours with a combination of Pultec-style low end boost, attenuation and sub sonic filtering, tweak the top end and then give it some weight with a faster compression setting and a bit of sidechain filter tinkering. Bass? How much do you want? How much string attack? You want super smooth compression to lock it into the perfect place in the mix? There, I’ve just dialled it in and it sounds freakin’ great! As though I’d spent an hour on it in DAW-land — mousing plug-ins and fiddling with parallel processing etc., etc. — except I only spent five minutes tweaking the black knobs on a grey box, and actually, it sounds way better than any of my plug-ins ever do.

BUILT TOUGH, SOUNDS SWEET

OK I’m getting ahead of myself here but seriously folks, the Powerstrip really is a joy to use, and being an all-valve channel strip from the Retro factory it’s no great surprise. I’ve used Retro’s stereo EQ and 176 compressor before and been very impressed at how tweakable and just plain great-sounding they were, so I was pretty rapt to see a whole Retro recording channel turn up for review.

The unit has a timeless look with an old-style gain reduction meter (no backlight on this, unfortunately), and full size metal toggle switches and classy rotary knobs. The layout is clean and, like all the Retro gear, everything feels and looks like it’s built for the long haul.

WHERE’S THE STEERING WHEEL?

The most noticeable ‘how’s that?’ when you first approach the Powerstrip is the seeming absence of any preamp input control. In fact, all levels are controlled via the input and output knobs over on the right hand side of the unit in the compressor section. With the comp switched out they are simply I/O controls. With the comp switched in you are controlling preamp and compressor input levels with one knob — a bit of a compromise but in most cases this is, surprisingly, not really a big deal. Like a UREI 1176, the compressor’s threshold is simply set by how much gain you introduce into the circuit. Drive the input hard enough and you can achieve very nice break-up through the preamp and compressor signal paths, and the preamp has an extra little trick up its sleeve; if you pull the input gain control it clicks out to a ‘vintage’ setting which has a slightly darker and more grainy tonality.

OLD SMOOTHY

I initially used the Powerstrip on some TV scoring work and found the ‘vintage’ preamp setting with some subtle EQ and compression worked a treat with an Octava ribbon mic for darker string arrangements, percussion, clarinets…basically everything. More recently I’ve been going a bit more rock ‘n’ roll with it on kick, snare, overheads, bass, guitars and vocals and really there’s nothing it can’t handle. The preamp is versatile, powerful and great sounding, while the EQ has a super sweet musicality, and the compressor is beautifully smooth and gluey. Mixing and reprocessing tracks through the Powerstrip is an absolute pleasure and the results can be truly stunning. Boosting the tops at 16kHz on things like drum overheads is just gobsmackingly good. Indeed you have to work really hard to make this thing misbehave. Being such a tweakable unit I found myself not so much looking for a good sound as having to choose between different types of good — a nice problem to have!