New Music Gear Monday: Black Lion Audio Auteur 8DAT

Tracking a full band or a drum kit always seems to expose the same problem, which is that you never quite have enough good preamps to go around. You end up borrowing channels from your interface, patching in whatever outboard you can find, and hoping the whole rig stays in sync while you do it. Black Lion Audio has a cleaner solution with the new Auteur 8DAT, which packs eight channels of its acclaimed Auteur preamp into a single 2U box, then throws in a word clock and an ADAT expander for good measure.

Eight Channels Of Auteur Tone

The Auteur preamp has built a solid reputation over the years for being genuinely flexible, and the 8DAT brings that same hybrid design to all eight channels at once.

Each one starts with a fast, transparent IC-based front end, then runs through a Cinemag output transformer that adds weight and color once you push it.

That means you can keep things clean and modern at conservative gain levels, or drive it harder for some classic British-style saturation, all without leaving the channel strip.

Every input gets its own phantom power, polarity reverse, and a -10 dB pad, plus a front-panel quarter-inch input that switches between DI and line level, so tracking a bass or guitar directly is no problem.

There are also eight insert points wired through DB25 connectors, switchable right from the front panel, which makes A/B’ing outboard processing painless. Those same sends can double as mults for parallel chains or mid-side setups.

Built-In Word Clock And ADAT

Beyond the preamps, the 8DAT doubles as a word clock capable of syncing an entire recording rig.

Black Lion’s patented Macro-MMC clocking technology is built to keep jitter extremely low, which helps preserve transient detail and stereo imaging rather than letting phase issues muddy things up. You can clock your whole system from the 8DAT over BNC, or feed it an external clock if you already have one you trust.

The conversion comes from the same design used in Black Lion’s Revolution interfaces, and the unit is stuffed with Vishay, Wima, and Nichicon capacitors along with thin-film resistors for low noise throughout.

The whole thing is housed in a black-anodized aluminum chassis built to survive both studio and road use, and everything routes out through analog XLR or ADAT so it can slot into just about any existing setup.

The Auteur 8DAT is available now for pre-order with a US price of $1,999, and it’s expected to start shipping any time now. You can find out more here.

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