Founded in 1958 by Bill Putnam Sr., Universal Audio has earned their place as a recording gear mainstay in the biggest studios, with their attention to detail and ear for artistry. Since Putnam Sr.'s sons re-founded the company in 1999, they've built upon UA’s rich tradition—from revamping their line of analog classics, such as the 1176 compressor and SOLO/610 preamp, to introducing their Apollo audio interfaces. The new Volt series adds a new chapter to UA’s storied legacy by putting their legendary sound in even more hands—both in and out of the studio.
Sparing no consideration, the same team that engineered the Apollo lineup designed the bus-powered Volt to be portable, easy to use, aesthetically timeless and endowed with a vintage-style preamp that sounds great right out of the box.
We chatted with Shawn Ellis, the director of hardware products at Universal Audio, to get the inside track on all things Volt. From the 610-informed preamp circuitry, 1176-inspired compression to the chassis design, we discussed everything there is to know about the conception and function of this groundbreaking studio tool.
The HUB: Can you tell us a little bit about the new Volt family?
SE: Volt is our brand-new line of USB audio interfaces. We're super happy to be announcing these to the world. They sound great. They give that classic Universal Audio sound, super easy to use, and have a timeless design. We think it's going to be really popular with people that are already part of the UA family, but also for those who are brand new to it. That's what really excites us about it.
The HUB: Volt is your first line of interfaces that doesn’t have onboard UAD processing. With that in mind, what were the key components to making this feel like a UA interface?
SE: That's a good point. First and foremost, for us, it had to provide classic sound out of the box. We want it to make your recording sound like records, so to speak. We put a lot of effort and emphasis in the design aspect of all our products. The combination of classic sound, timeless design and ease of use were really the components that needed to come together.
I think there are different ways to approach what we're calling “classic sound.” These products don't have DSP, but we can approach achieving that sound through analog means. And that's exactly what we've done on the new Volt series of USB audio interfaces.
The HUB: There are two sub-families within the Volt lineup. Can you give us a broad overview of the key differences?
SE: The line consists of five products. First, we’ll look at Volt 1 and Volt 2. These two models have the vintage preamp circuit on them, but they don't have the 76 compressor. And then, the Volt 176, Volt 276 and Volt 476 have both the vintage preamp circuit as well as the 76 compressor circuit. The design is slightly different, as well.
By and large, the single-input Volt 1 and Volt 176 are great for people that might be doing podcasts, or just want to do vocals or just have their guitar. They're doing one thing at a time. The main difference between Volt 1 and the 176 is the 76 compressor. Does the user desire that sound, require that utility? And so, we have one of each, both with and without. You can take that thinking and apply it to the full line.
The HUB: Can you give us a little background on the “vintage-inspired” preamp and the 76 compressor? What do they sound like?
SE: The vintage mic preamp was inspired by Universal Audio's 610 tube preamplifier. What's that? It's a very classic, old mic pre that we created a long time ago that's been used on tons of records by artists that everyone knows, like Van Halen, Coldplay and too many more to list. Tubes are talked about a lot as creating a sense of warmth or richness in audio. Of course, we don't have tubes in the Volt series, but we can emulate the sound of tubes through just analog solid-state circuitry, which we’ve done on all five of the Volt interfaces. So, when you engage that, because it is engageable by the button on the front, it brings some of this tube-like warmth and richness to the sound, whether it's a guitar or your voice, or some other instrument you're recording via microphone.
Next, let's talk about the 76 compressor. What is a compressor in the first place? Well, a compressor helps smooth out the sound, right? It helps smooth out the peaks to create more of a polished, professional-sounding result—whether that's singing, spoken word, instruments, etc.
The 76 compressor analog circuit that's in the Volt 176, Volt 276 and Volt 476 is inspired by and based on Universal Audio's legendary 1176LN solid-state limiting amplifier. Why is that interesting? The 1176 has been used on tons of records from artists as big as Led Zeppelin, the Rolling Stones and Michael Jackson, just to name a few. And so, we figured out ways to basically take analog circuitry—again, the 1176 original has all solid-state circuitry—and create a circuit that is close and emulates the feeling of the 1176 compressor.
So, what do you get when you engage the 76 compressor? You get clarity, punch and polish. You get a very professional sound. The vintage mic preamp and the 76 compressor really come together give you that classic, “sounds like a record” result.
The HUB: What degree of control will someone have when they're engaging the vintage mic pre using the 76 model? What can they do to make it work for their sound?
SE: Both the vintage mic pre circuit and the 76 compressor are engageable through buttons. Let's talk about the vintage mic pre first. It's an on/off setting, but the tone will change depending how hard you drive it, meaning how high you turn up the gain. You can go beyond warmth, and get a little bit of grit and a little bit of almost analog distortion by going into that realm—just by turning up the knob. You have that control of how hard you want to drive it, by simply controlling the gain knob.
The HUB: It'll react differently based on how loud your signal is coming in as well, right?
SE: Absolutely. Not only the dynamism of the performance, so to speak, but also how high you have it set on the unit itself.
Now, the 76 compressor. Compressors have a lot of controls on them to finesse out a lot of different nuances, depending on what you're recording. But we wanted to make this super easy. So, we have three presets that we've created for the 76 compressor. The first one is for vocals. The second one is guitar, and the third one, we're calling it "fast." These aren't hard and fast rules. These are suggestions of what might work for what you have in your recording. Vocals, as it says, for vocals. Guitars, for guitar, bass-type material. And then, fast, you might want to use on highly percussive sounds that kind of have a bang in the beginning and that you might want to tame down.
Again, just like the original 1176, the response of the 76 compressor on Volt interfaces will change depending on how much you drive the input, right? It's dependent on the input drive, to your point a second ago about how the dynamism of the performance affects it. If you drive it harder by turning up the gain, the 76 compressor circuit itself will start to change and react to that.
The HUB: So, to your point about there being no “hard and fast rules”, the fast setting could work for certain types of vocals, or say, a particularly percussive piano, right?
SE: That's right. They're guidelines. We really suggest people starting out just try something, listen to it, try something else and just go with what, ultimately, they think sounds the best. I happen to love the vocal setting on my electric bass. I think it sounds awesome.
The HUB: A lot of recording musicians and engineers have become accustomed to not committing to a sound. You record something relatively clean or unprocessed, and it's like "Oh, I'll deal with that using plug-ins later." But bringing it in through that 76 compressor, you're committing to something. It's the same as you might do as a guitarist with a guitar pedal, right? You record and commit to that sound.
SE: I think that's a great comparison. We wanted it to be super easy to get these sounds, and not be burdensome or not have to overthink it. It sounds great right out of the box. Just turn it on, turn it up and go.
The HUB: If someone's looking at these new Volt interfaces and they're comparing them, whether to your Apollo line or something from your competitors, it's very easy to kind of get lost in specs. You have sample rate, you have bit depth, you have signal to noise. So, when someone like UA talks about "best-in-class" audio, what does that actually mean? What does that mean from a recording and mixing standpoint? How will that impact the end result, or even the in-process result?
SE: When you talk about sampling rates and bit depths and things like this, those types of specs are table stakes to some degree, and it's one ingredient in the entire system. We take a complete system-level view, if you will. How does the entire product, from the input to the output and back again, perform? How do the analog circuits, which are in line before the converters, the analog-to-digital converters, perform overall? Taken in its totality, thinking about what sound quality means, we can firmly say it's best-in-class sound quality.
Just thinking about the bit depth, the headroom or the noise doesn’t take into account the entire signal path of the system, and we really spent a lot of time thinking about that system as a whole.
The HUB: Did any DNA from the Apollo X family make its way into the Volts?
SE: Absolutely. As you can imagine, the circuitry, the details of the circuitry are quite different because Volt is different from Apollo. But it's the same team. We've got the same engineers, same product people, the same DSP engineers helping out. The people that were involved in the vintage mic pre circuit and the 76 compressor circuit on the Volt are the same people that have built and worked on the original products. And so, while it's a different beast inherently, all of the learnings, everything that we know as Universal Audio, we have brought to bear on the Volt line in some way or another.
The HUB: Running down the specs a little bit, I noticed that they’re compatible with iOS devices. How do you handle power on these units?
SE: The Volt USB audio interfaces are class-compliant, which means they work with iPhone and iPad devices out of the box. However, in some cases, you do need Apple's camera connector. If you have what Apple calls a Lightning connector on your iOS or iPad OS device, you do need the Apple Lightning camera kit connector. In this case, you also need to power the Volt device with some sort of external power supply.
However, with newer iPad Pros, they can supply something, I think up to 7 watts of power, and so with all of these except for the Volt 476, you can power the Volt interface by just plugging it directly into the iPad Pro. So, if you have an iPad that has a USB-C connector, then you can just use it without that camera connector. And, in most cases, the iPad will actually power the device, which is super cool because you take your Volt and your iPad, and you truly have absolute mobility.
The HUB: Can you speak to LUNA compatibility with Volt?
SE: It's something that we're looking into very seriously, but as of today, Volt will not work with LUNA. To use LUNA, you still need to have an Apollo device.
The HUB: How do you make the interface “instantaneous” for users?
SE: As we talked about a second ago, design is a very, very important aspect of any product that we do. There are the different aspects of design. There's the look and feel of it. There are the actual materials that are used. But then there's the actual user interface.
When we were setting out to make Volt, we knew that we wanted to make them compact and portable. Just by being a USB audio interface, there's a lot of utility in the portability of these interfaces. But we also wanted to have a really easy-to-use interface. For example, the buttons that engage the different circuits, the feeling of those and the lights and the relationship to the knobs around them. We spent a lot of time thinking about ergonomics. How does it look and how does it feel? As you know, when a product puts a smile on your face, it puts you in a more creative mood; something that's going to be on your desk and be part of your creative endeavor that looks great. It's going to make you feel great, and hopefully that'll help the creative process. Just like a guitar. You see a guitar, and you're like, oh, my God. It's beautiful. You just want to play it. The same should be true for interfaces, I think.
The HUB: To your point, it’s something that you may be spending a lot of time with. And you might be spending a lot of time in a darkened room, and it may be the one constant if you’re making music while traveling. So, I imagine all of that goes into it, even what type of LEDs are you using.
SE: Absolutely. We wanted these LEDs to be colorful and bright and fun, but knowing that they might be used in very bright situations like natural sunlight, etc., we made sure that they were visible in a variety of light settings and not just in darkened home studios, for example. Maybe you're out and about in the park or you're next to a window at school, and we want it to be visible in that situation as well. So, absolutely, we put a lot of thought into it.
The HUB: Can you give us a rundown of the software you’ve bundled with it? I imagine curating that must’ve been kind of fun.
SE: It's quite a list, and we're super proud and happy to be offering this bundle of software with every Volt. Users get free access to things like Ableton Live Lite, Melodyne 5 Essentials from Celemony, a handful of things from Plugin Alliance.
You've got the Ampeg SVT VR classic which, as a bass player, is super cool, but also some stuff from Brainworx like Masterdesk, Tuner, etc. Relab LX40 Essentials, which is a great tool. And then, from Softube, a Marshall Plexi Classic and Marshall Classic tone bundle. Spitfire Labs, which are some great tools there. And then a couple things from UJAM, namely Virtual Drummer Deep and Virtual Basses Dandy.
I just rattled off a lot of software, but what was really important to us was creating a complete palette of tools for music and other content creation, that we didn’t leave any big gaps for users, didn’t leave them in a lurch because they didn’t have a certain tool to create a complete production. We're super proud of what we've been able to offer.
The HUB: One final question. For a lot of people picking up Volt, this will be their first entrance into the world of Universal Audio gear. What would be the next piece you’d recommend for someone looking to go a bit deeper into the UA ecosystem?
SE: When I think about this, the obvious next step you'd take on the path is to be able to get into the world of UAD-2 plug-ins. This is our enormous suite of digital plug-ins that run on DSP devices like Apollos. That opens up a totally new world of tools and creative possibilities, and so the way that you do get into the world of UAD-2 plug-ins is via an Apollo. You can also do this through a UAD-2 Satellite—which is not an interface, but just has the DSP on the unit itself—and you can also do it through other Apollo interfaces that are not too far of a step away from the Volt line. Specifically thinking about the Apollo Solo or the Apollo Twin X. Again, this is the doorway into UAD-2 plug-ins that really starts to unlock power in the digital realm.
The HUB: It’s been great chatting with you today, Shawn! Thanks so much for your time.
SE: Thank you!