All In the tests

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With few exceptions, microphones today are more or less inspired by german classics which were released in the 1950’s and 60’s. With a few exceptions... Here is one: The Crowley & Tripp El Diablo, a kind of revolution in the small world of ribbon microphones. Let’s review it!

A little history...

Crowley & Tripp is a newcomer in the audio world. Founded in 2004, the company has its background in medical acoustic research and has started to work in the audio domain using the same technical skills. Bob Crowley and Hugh Tripp have developed their own technologies, building ribbon microphones, with one word in mind: originality. Among their creations, the Naked Eye has been really successful, particularly in the USA.
Crowley & Tripp’s most recent microphone, El Diablo is also their most innovative product. Instead of aluminum or duraluminum, the ribbon is made of a special Roswellite Advanced Material, engineered with nanoscaled structures, such as carbon nanotubes.

This technology tackles the main shortcoming of a ribbon mic: its fragility. Actually, a ribbon mic has two enemies: the phantom power and the higher sound pressure levels (SPL). Even if some ribbon mics have succeeded in managing the phantom power issue, they still have problems with SPL. Usually, a ribbon mic that has been submitted to a high SPL is at risk of being damaged.

Conceived in partnership with the famous Mercenary Audio’s “Fletcher”, the El Diablo specifications were simple: create an extreme SPL capable ribbon microphone. One of the challenge was to make it ideal for bass drum recording...

Such a mic needs exceptional test conditions. We were lucky enough to access the pro environment Studio de la Reine, and benefit from the golden ears of its residents: Laurent, François and Jérémy. We “tortured” the El Diablo in the 30m2 live room, whose acoustical treatment has been designed by Jean-Pierre Lafont. We used three kicks, one snare drum, a bass and two guitar amps, mic’ed simultaneously by the El Diablo and also with the mics normally used in each of these recording situations.

The audio path: the signals go in a SSL 4000 G, are converted by an Apogee AD-16 and recorded in a Pro Tools HD.