The Tierra Audio offer on Milk Audio Store

We already had the chance to talk about Tierra Audio when we made the video test of the Gravity VCA Bus Compressor.

Tierra Audio is a Company started in Spain in 2018. The founders had spent quite a few years in developing products before incorporating.

The Company's vision is to realize high quality tools while keeping the prices at reasonable values and maintaining special focus on the sustainability of products and processes.

To minimize the impact on our echosystem, a special care is dedicated to the design phase, the material and component selection, the packaging and the operation's management (all the assemblies are hand made in Spain).

The look is also addressed in a discriminating way.

The final result is both distinctive and functional. The devices in the catalog all have a cherry wood front panel with the control labels hot-engraved with a laser engrave process.

Here below we shall talk about the Tierra Audio portfolio available at Milk Audio Store.

The Tierra Audio pre-amplifiers

Two are the available models: Lava Preamp e Calima Preamp.

The first one (Lava Preamp) is meant to provide an organic sound, warm and present at the same time. The circuit is realized with discrete components with Carnhill(input) and Lundahl (output) transformers.

It has Mic, Line and high impedence (Hi-Z) inputs selectable from the front panel.

The Gain knob allows up to 70dB of gain and the Outputcontrol can add further 10dB more. No problems than, even with ribbon microphones.

Phantompower, Padand Phaseinversion can be activated with dedicated switches.

A movingo coil VU meter and a power button complete the control set.

The Calima Preamp has the same layout but a more aggressive sound thanks to a fast response design with focus on the signal presence.

The input transformer is made by Cinemagwhile the output one comes from Lundahl. Calima Preamp has aslighty higher headroom if compared with the Lava Preamp (23dB versus 20 dB) just because of the fastest electronics on board.

It becomes clear that Tierra Audio, with those two preamps, wanted to provide a quite large amount of choices to cover almos all the studio's needs.

The Tierra Audio compressors

Also in this case we have two possibilities.

Boreal FET Compressor is easily guessed to be an FET unit.

The controls are those usual in this kind of equipment. The Inputknob acts on the compression level increasing the signal amount over a fixed threshold.

The Outputone takes care of the make up gain. A swith controls the compression ratios and it has the last position marked as OOMPH! The option activates the infamous All Button Trick.

Attackand Releasealso have specific controls ranging from Slow (with a Turtle icon) to fast (marked with a Hare icon).

An HPF on the side chain avoid to mess with low frequencies and a button labeled Just Color disengages the side-chain and make the Boreal to behave just like a line preamp.

This option is useful to add the transformer's color without compressing the signal. Transformers, in this case, are Triad Magnetics (output) and Lundahl (input). The gain reduction can be measured with a beautiful VU meter.

We have already talked about the Tierra Audio Gravity VCA Bus Compressor. It belongs to the VCA family and, being stereo, is meant to be used on the mix bus. We don't see any reasons against using the compressor also on mono or dual-mono sigals, indeed.

It sports the classic five controls: Threshold, Ratio, Attack, Releasee Make Up Gain.

The HPF filter on the side chain is still available as well as a moving coil Gain Reduction Meter.

So, also in the field of dynamic control we can say that Tierra Audio can help us in many ways.

Tierra Audio Icicle Equalizer

This is the Tierra Audio proposal for frequency spectrum control. The equalizer is called Icicle.

The several controls are, this time, well placed in a two rack units panel. Four bands are available.

The first three (Low, Low Middle and High Middle) are fully parametric (with Gain, Freqand Q controls).

The low frequency filter can be switched from Bellto Shelf.

The shelf only filter for high frequencies has two controls: Gainand Frequency. A switch allows the engineer to select between two different filter slopes. The higher one shows also a resonant peak.

This feature, together with the quite large frequency span available (from 1000Hz to 20KHz) makes this filter close to those that can be found in the analog synthesizers.

A further potentiometer can make the sound ranginf from Cleanto OOMPH! using a non linear circuiti to add harmonics.

The output stage is served by a Triad Magnetics transformer.

The Tierra Audio Canyon 16 Summing Mixer

Last but not least we have the Canyon 16 Summing Mixer. 16 are the available input channels. Each of them can be processed with Leveland Pancontrols.

The Master control can add up to 10dB. An Insert Blend knob allows for parallel processing from the hardware connected to the available insert circuit. The Gravity VCA Compressor seems to be an ideal candidate for this purpose.

A couple of VU meters help in analysing the output signal. Here a Clean/OOMPH! Selector can be used to include (or remove) two Lundhal transformers in the signal path.

Wrap up

As you should have understood at this point, Tierra Audio is a new Company but it has the right aces in the sleeve to enter the audio pro market.

The available processors allows for almost every application.

They are robust and reliable and also with a specific design which can help even from the haestetical point of view.

The prices are fine, neither chip nor expensive. So, step into the Milk Audio Store for a personal test!