New OmniTec-67 Vintage Preamp Plug-in

Black Rooster Audio makes Motown’s ‘secret sauce’ available to all with OmniTec-67A vintage preamp plug-in.

Black Rooster Audio announces the availability of OmniTec-67A — taking its inspiration from the acclaimed Altec 1567A vintage tube mixer as the beautifully designed vintage gear emulation plug-in producer’s latest release, realising lush vintage tube saturation (like its hardware counterpart), conceived as the perfect tool to add saturation, harmonics, and subtle distortion to vocal, bass, and drum tracks alike.

Altec’s acclaimed 1567A was originally released in the early Sixties as a rack-mounted tube mixer that had a simple two-knob EQ and a whopping 97 dB of gain! Indeed, its sound suffused whatever was being processed with welcomed character, density, and grit, while its signature green faceplate visually set it apart from the gear of the time. Today it is still a go-to unit for that unmistakably raw analogue sound!

Back in the Sixties (and beyond), the 1567A heavily influenced the sound of countless Motown hits — from The Supremes to The Temptations. It is impossible to think of Motown without thinking of the deliberately distorted and oversaturated brass sections, electric piano, bass, and vocals that gave those songs the sound that is so well known and loved today, thanks to extraordinary engineers like Russ Terrrana and Matt Wallace putting the 1567A to such good use. Ultimately, that iconic piece of studio gear can be credited for the sound of a generation, bolstered by the trailblazing recording techniques that those talented engineers used at the time.

The Altec 1567A stuck around after the Motown era, ending up as the gold standard for achieving a cost-effective coloured sound. Above and beyond their technical excellence, Motown producers focused on creating an apparent aesthetic, one which was so influential that many artists across pop, rock, soul, indie, and hip-hop still implement it today… from vocals to harmonic rhythm sections, the Motown sound is here to stay.

OmniTec-67A includes a LINE/MIC LEVEL switch, so users can select a source, each with its own frequency response and behaviour — mic impedance versus line impedance, in other words, while the plug-in also auto-compensates at the output stage. Digging deeper, the mic input introduces the incoming signal into a microphone transformer, then into a premix amplifier, adding an additional saturation stage that users can control using the level of the incoming signal, while the line input is connected straight into the input switch. Since there is no level difference between the mic and line input in the digital world, Black Rooster Audio has helpfully compensated for the line input signal to reach the same boosted level as the mic input.

Black Rooster Audio’s OmniTec-67A vintage preamp plug-in allows anyone to step back in time and breathe new life into present-day digital recordings with all of the magic of analogue recording — and none of the hassle inherent in analogue gear.

OmniTec-67A is available to purchase for a time-limited introductory promo price of only $49.00 USD — rising thereafter to its regular price of $99.00 USD — as an AAX-, AU-, and VST-compatible plug-in for Mac (OS X 10.9 or newer) and Windows (7 or newer) directly from Black Rooster Audio via its dedicated webpage, which also includes some sound samples, HERE: