Rupert Neve Designs Portico 5012 Mic Preamp - Horizontal

The Rupert Neve Portico™ 5012 is a dual channel mic pre featuring Mr. Rupert Neve’s custom input and output transformer designs. In addition to individually selectable phase, mute, phantom power and a fully sweepable high pass filter, the 5012 incorporates a ‘Silk’ circuit which yields the rich warmth and presence of the renowned classic designs.

A single Rupert Neve Designs 5012 comes with a Power Adapter (Model # 5100-PS) that will work from virtually any public Mains supply world-wide. The Power Adaptor is designed to power up to two modules. A U.S. type power cord is also supplied when ordered direct from Rupert Neve Designs. A different power cord would be supplied if ordered from an overseas distributor or if specified at the time of ordering.

When two 5012 modules are ordered together, a Horizontal Joining Kit (Model # 5221-RM) and a Y-Splitter Cable (Model # 5122-YC) will be supplied free of charge. For quantities greater than two, please consult Technical Sales for the best way to mount and power multiple Portico™ modules. Many powering options are available. Portico™ modules actually require any external DC supply from 9 volts to 18 volts.

Modules can be daisy-chained so that, for example, a group of Portico™ 5012's in a flight case could work for many hours off a 12-volt car battery without any limitations of performance - ideal for field work.

The Rupert Neve Designs PORTICO™ Series of modules (5000 Series) is designed to form an integrated modular console system that may include modules already on hand in the control room! These may include high quality vintage modules and their modern equivalents manufactured to my original specifications.

In order that modules can work together as would be expected (i.e. in a proprietary console configuration) without producing hum, R.F. interference, or other interactions, the connecting interfaces, grounding, levels and impedances must receive careful attention. Each Portico™ module is a complete integral signal processor that delivers its specified performance independently. This is one of the reasons we use transformers.

Why Transformers?
A complete discussion on transformers is out of place at this point but a technical discussion will be posted at a later date. Here it is helpful to review some of the essentials where it will be seen that a design needs to be viewed as a whole, not simply from the point of view of a single component.

The fine subtleties of circuit design relating to sonic performance are gradually becoming more clearly understood. For example, research has shown conclusively that frequencies above 20 kHz affect the way in which humans perceive sound quality. But, long before scientific evidence emerged a substantial body of musicians and engineers knew that equipment with apparently the same technical measurements could sound very different.

Incredibly small amounts of musically dissonant odd harmonics have a disastrous effect on the sound quality. Extraneous noise or interference that finds its way into a signal path seriously impairs performance of the whole chain.

Many control rooms make use of outboard gear that is not well protected from external signals. Poor grounding of such equipment can be a serious problem. “Electronically balanced” circuits much used in modern equipment, can give very good measurements on the test bench but they do not provide adequate rejection of the stray fields found in every working environment.