PSP Audioware BinAmp $99 PC MAC

We are taught to not judge a book by its cover… keep this in mind when first looking at BinAmp, says the ever-erudite Stuart Adams

- Stuart Adams

Look far enough back into the history of audio recording technology and you find yourself surveying a graveyard of once-great names now sadly deceased. Look more closely and you’ll also notice gangs of plugin developers searching the epitaphs for an as-yet untapped manufacturer or product to resurrect into digitally modelled glory.

This isn’t something we’re used to seeing PSP Audioware doing though, since the company tends towards original creations. However, its latest release, BinAmp, is in many ways not a typical PSP plugin.

Echorec without the echo

BinAmp resurrects the Binson Echorec 2° (‘2°’ is the Italian equivalent of the English ‘2nd’), but PSP has discarded the original’s magnetic drumbased echo generation, focusing solely on the Class A, triode valve preamp circuit responsible for the original’s characteristic warm, rich sound.

The preamp starts with a filter stage offering both high-pass from 5 to 250Hz and a highfrequency rolloff ranging from 30kHz down to 6kHz. This is followed by a Character dial that modifies the circuit’s response time, in effect letting it swing from a fat, warm, woolly- sounding saturation through to a tighter, edgier and more broken-up distortion.

The Drive knob controls the input gain and therefore the overall strength of overdrive, but it also applies a compensating reduction in the output gain. This is a really nice touch, making it much easier to hone in on the desired amount of drive without having to continuously tweak the output level.

Underdrive?