The Alice 503 Mic Pre with Limiter microphone input uses unique circuitry designed to get full warmth from any professional microphone while at the same time having that ‘fairy-dust’ sound. Both microphone and line inputs maintain wide overload margins and extreme low noise performance. The audio gain in the system is shared across four lownoise amplifier stages to handle the most difficult of sounds.
 
The limiter/compressor is a classic Ted Fletcher design from 1979 when it was first introduced in the Alice 828 portable mixer and known to have gained admiration and used by top artists and major studios just for the sound of the limiter! Special Technical Features
 
TRANSIENT DISTORTION — In conventional microphone amplifiers most of the amplification is in a single amplifier stage which may measure as ‘low distortion’ with test tones, but very often, small transient spikes disturb the stability of the amplifier and produce momentary peaks that are not amplified correctly. This can and does degrade the sound but the 503 with ‘shared gain’, handles transient peaks perfectly.
 
HARMONIC DISTORTION — The Alice 503 microphone amplifier is in 4 sections; this arrangement minimises unpleasant 3rd order harmonic distortion even at low frequencies producing warm full sounds getting the very best from your microphone. When the limiter is in use there is an increase in 2nd order harmonic content, this is a natural effect of this limiter and produces a ‘warming’ effect to the sound.
 
NOISE — Absolute ‘State-of-the-Art’ noise performance and high gain makes the 503 ideal for matching with ribbon microphones.