Proudly from their beginning, MANLEY LABS have been closely involved with numerous mastering facilities around the world. For these most demanding engineers in our industry, they have created specialised products such as their all-tube tape repro head amps, digital converters, high-powered vacuum tube monitor amplifiers, through to custom monitoring consoles, all the way up to complete facility design and installation. The Mastering Version of the SLAM! incorporating detented and logable 1/2dB steps built with 1% metal film resistors on sealed gold-contact Grayhill switches is in full production. Manley's engineers generally prefer it to the non-mastering version for stereo tracks. There is a lot less fiddling involved to maintain L/R balances and the new modes are subtle but fun. It is easy to make just about anything sound better. Unique Features for the Mastering Version: There are no mic preamps or instrument inputs. Instead the tube sections are paralleled for lower noise and less distortion. All pots are replaced with rotary switches for detented recallability and easier calibration. The mastering version has a true hard-wire bypass function, which is not possible on the regular version with mic preamps, etc. Now there's one stereo true hardwire stereo BYPASS button instead separate L & R bypass buttons as found in the regular version. On the right side is a button to select the DAC select if the Digital Converter Option was installed – or – enact Limiter Bypass (while keeping the tubes and transformers still active). There are dedicated unbalanced transformerless inputs on the mastering version. On the back is a switch to select the XLR or 1/4” inputs. The ELOP® limiter on the Mastering Version has 5 ratios, which may put it into the compressor/ limiter category. The lower ratios may be better suited for complex mixes. The FET limiter has 5 selectable modes. Digital option is calibrated for +14dBu =DFS rather than +16 dBu.
