Analogue Sound for the Digital Age

Only the very best in analog equipment for the digital age

Welcome to secondorderharmonics.com/.eu — find out more about us, our work and passion.

Our work and focus

Hand-crafted and artisanal Audio/Studio exquisites ~ from new products to modded clones of only the best consoles/parts from the 50ies to late 80ies ~ design, manufacture, customization, repair & improvements. We also rent-out gear and experts on T&M basis for tracking, mixing and recording sessions; make sure a dead OpAmp or Capacitor isn’t holding up thousands of euros of Studio- and Musicians’ Time! Need something you can’t really find as a product on the market? Or even better: there’s a product you’d like but it’s missing many options (e.g. inserts, busses, outputs, summing, specific amplification or coloring via tubes, transformers or modular colour modules)? You’ve come to the right place. Whether it be a modification of an existing outboard unit, re-capping and upgrading old Yamaha, Soundcraft, Tascam (Indeed it’s rare, but we also do repair, upgrades and mods on vintage Neve, EMI and API originals!).

Modification and custom designs:

We design custom audio circuits for various use cases: from clones of vintage equipment to mods of them, summing circuits, ADC/DACs, intelligent patch-bay designs and Discrete Operational Amplifiers, among many other things. Get in contact if your studio is missing a piece of equipment or central component to glue many of your precious studio-pieces together.

Summing and Compression:

We specialize in Summing and Busses of Consoles among microphone pre-amps, EQs and above everything else: Compression! of every kind. Be it Vari-Mu (aka Tube), VCA, FET, Diode-Bridge (e.g. Neve 33609), PWM (Py), FET (1173) or Opto (LA2A..3A & many others, old and new) ~ compressors have become an obession for us. Along with mastering EQs they’ve had the biggest impact on sound quality, tracking depth and thickness and clarity of sound without loss in quality.

A Passion for the right-sounding gear at the right place & time

1. Customized Clones of Neve, API, EMI, and other famous audio consoles (we prefer 500 Series for various reasons, but work with any kind of out-board gear and also directly on vintage consoles from many brands)
2. Summing: In todays world everyone uses a DAW for recording, even Studios with 96 Channel Consoles have ProTools running, audio-interfaces with fairly decent specs have become affordable for musicians themselves, as have some outboard solutions: Pres, EQs, FX.
   • Without summing and bussing to various 2TRK (two track) outputs, it’s fairly difficult to work with low-latency outboard gear while editing mixes in a DAW or tracking live via a ADC/DAC interface and controling it’s inputs/faders/impendence settings (e.g. HiZ).
   • Most summimng units on the market are hugely overprized, we have no idea why. One of the first units we came up with was a 8 Channel to 2xCombo XLR/TRS (Stereo or Mono) outputs that fits in one hand. The design has since been open-sourced and the hardware is still being updated with newer revisions from time to time. But customers are usually asking us for specific requirements - everyone has other outboard gear, different audio cards or ADC/DACs from UAD to Lavry, from MOTU to Focusrite to Arturia, there are so many on the market, you can spend hours just on finding an appropriate ADAT S/MUX expander. Summing helps. For some Outputs but especially for Inputs. Just like having an external 8-12CH mixer routed to the input of your ADC/Audio Interface you can sum the channels of different inputs to 2TRK/Main on a Summing Bus. And we feel you shouldn’t pay thousands of euros for - often passive - products in a nice case.
   • So..customized summers: Want to amplifiy Channel 1-8 but not 8-16? Because 1-8 are direct inputs whereas 8-16 come from dedicated pre-amps or a mixer? No Problem. Want multiple busses, inserts, gain staging, output OpAmps or Transformers? Sure. Talk to us.
3. Amplification: from Mic Pre-amps to Console/Outboard Bus Amps. We work on all of it: clones of famous vintage equipment, our own designs, mods of existing equipment (old and new, vintage and clones). We upgrade to the newest IC OpAmps on the Market with THD+N (distortion) lower than 0.00004%. We also work on ‘fast’ and ‘colored’ Discrete OpAmps (DOAs) in API-2520 or JE-990 Pinout.
4. We support OSHW (Open Source Hardware, usually under a Creative Commons or CERN OHL License) and publish our work on GitHub. This includes all artefacts: Schematics, eCAD files, Gerbers, PnP (Pick&Place), BOM as well as any embedded Firmware Source Code (if relevant) and Documentation. We educate about audio electronics, common misconceptions, good/bad ideas - and are happy about any input you might have to share. Questions to ask or a product we can realize for you & ideally the community in general. Check out our Github or get directly in contact with us (see form below).

or go directly to:

• Rent + Hire
• Web Shop (eBay)