ROYER LABS dBOOSTER Inline Mic Gain Booster

Recording an album for the Melvins some decades ago, I put an RCA 74B a few feet back from King Buzzo’s Sunn amp and had my first listen to a ribbon mic. A friend had gifted it as a joke; he’d grabbed it at a garage sale, found it to be noisy and dismissed it as an unusable relic from a bygone day. As usual, I had an SM57 crammed up on one of Buzzo’s 12-inch speakers. When I listened to the RCA ribbon, it didn’t have the ugly 6kHz sizzle inherent to SM57s. The signal was indeed noisy, but noise was never an issue on Melvins’ albums so I rolled tape and never looked back.

I quickly learned that dynamic and condenser