Like Rupert’s well-known designs from his time in Little Shelford, England, the Dual Shelford Mic Pre utilizes custom step-up transformers on the microphone inputs, which provide the first 15dB of gain. “While the majority of the harmonic richness found in Rupert’s designs is a product of the output transformer and surrounding class-A amplifiers, this custom step-up input transformer also imparts a unique musical enhancement of its own,” says Rupert Neve Designs. According to the company, this is primarily a result of its reactive impedance characteristic and how that interacts with the connected microphone, “resulting in subtle, non-linear harmonic enhancement of the lows and an unmistakable sweetness in the high frequencies.”

The Dual Shelford Mic Pre also features 72dB of low-noise class-A gain, a sweepable high-pass filter, the company’s well-known Silk Red and Blue circuit for two flavors of customizable harmonic saturation, and the dual output level transformers originally developed for the Shelford Channel. The -6dB output from these custom transformers “allows the engineer to hit the ‘sweet spot’ of the output stage more easily, adding rich harmonic character without clipping the next device in the chain.”