Focusrite liquid channel users?!?!

[Raoul23]

Any one on here using a liquid channel or have used one?? I have a few questions I can’t find the answers to

Thanks in advance


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[AlexLakis]

I briefly owned a Liquid Channel...What's up?

[Southsidemusic]

Same here. Owned A Liquid Channel 12 years ago for a short time and was NOT impressed. Sold it half price after just a few short weeks. It was totally overhyped and over priced too. Emulations are a disappointment if you have used the hardware and honestly doesn't come close to any of the hardware it wants to emulate. And now it is an old old unit which never really took off and as it isn't analog gear it will never come back. Sorry.

[Raoul23]

Thanks for chiming I’m guys. I quite like it but there are a few things I not to sure about.

1st is that it’s quite noisy I use it with both my u87 warm audio and sm7b mics and get a lot of hiss? Gain when using the u87 is around 32 and when using the sm7b about 45. Did any of you guys find this

2nd I find that most of the time the input signal is not registering much on the left hand side but is fine on my 192

I’ve typed these questions in google but can’t seem to find an awesome, hopefully you guys can shed some light


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[Southsidemusic]

I really am not dissing you or anything, i was a bit harsh in the other post, just that as far as I remembered it was noisy and had some funky qirks like the ones you describe. Also there were only two or three patches ( settings ) that was useful enough to record with ( for our needs ) and i also remember it was VERY expensive back in 2006 when we had ours.

But today if you can find one for around 400 dollars it can be worth it for sure as those couple of settings we used ( think it was the green settings ) is worth the price So if you got it for a good price then why not. They were top of the line back then.

It was too bad about the noise but putting it in a good isolated rack will remove that hiss and purr hehe

It was and still is a high end product and if you learn to master it and the small workarounds needed it's a well built unit!

When you push The Gain the white noise becomes a bit annoying but nothing a well setup gate can't fix for the most part. All in all you will have to learn to live with the small annoyances and if you can do that I would say the Liquid Channels are useful for studio usage as long as you treat the audio recorded with it carefully so you don't kill the dynamic with too much plugins.

Let us know if you have more questions.

[Raoul23]

Shame about the noise thing, was thinking maybe I was doing something wrong.

At the mo I use the 1073 preamp setting and 1176 comp to my ears these sound good but I have heard good things about the green pre amp so I’ll give that setting a whirl. I did pick it up cheap so can’t complain about that really.


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[AlexLakis]

I bought my Liquid Channel from Sweetwater along with a Manley Voxbox (one of the units the Liquid Channel emulates...the two units were around the same price at the time, I think.) After some tests, I returned the Liquid Channel. It didn't stack up. And yes, it was noisy.


The SM7b needs a lot of clean gain to shine (I sit around 65 thru my API). If you are running a SM7b thru a 1073 into an 1176, depending on your settings and gain staging, you can get yourself into noise trouble for sure. Assuming there are no wiring/racking snafus like Christopher mentioned.

[albee1952]

If you dig the 1073 sound, I'd give a serious look at Warm Audio's WA273-EQ($1499) or if you can afford it, the Vintech 273(less EQ but probably better preamp emulation). Yes, both of these are 2-channel, and both are available as singles for less money, but I lean toward buying 2-channels in case I want to track something in stereo, or with 2 mics(I usually track guitars with an SM7 and a Fathead II ribbon, and often track lead vocals with both a tube and FET mics)

[Raoul23]

Ok so the noise thing is normal with the liquid channel at least I’m not going crazy with that.




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[Raoul23]

My power conditioner arrived the other week and I rewired the studio up today and guess what???! The noisy liquid channel is now silent. Yippie


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