TritonAudio Active Mic boosters — Review

[mikehalloran]

In another thread, I expressed a desire for more gain/headroom in the mic pres of my M•Audio AIR 192|14. What's onboard is quite good but all adjustments take place close to the end of the Input control that I've found it annoying and too fiddly to set up. I really wanted "what I have but louder".

Doug posted in response,

… Someone has a similar inline booster that passes phantom, maybe Triton? …

I knew about boosters for dynamic and ribbons and own some CloudLifters but boosters that pass phantom to condenser mics was news to me. Ok…

TritonAudio https://www.tritonaudio.com/products makes a couple, the FetHead Phantom
https://www.tritonaudio.com/fethead-phantom
and FetHead Broadcast
https://www.tritonaudio.com/fethead-broadcast
so I ordered one of each.

I tried them with pairs of AKG C535EB, C451B and a C636, one of my quietest mics with a higher input sensitivity than the others.

Both units are quite good and added quite a bit of headroom. Neither added much noise which, when levels were dialed in, was unnoticeable.Both come in a cloth bag inside a plastic tube In a nutshell:

The $159.95 Broadcast advertises a 23dB boost and has a "rumble" (low pass, I'm guessing 80Hz) filter. It requires an additional cable to connect—inline only. With my C636, the mic is so sensitive that I could not mute it by turning the pot to 0 while the C535 and C451 were closer to Off. It has a rectangular steel box that looks like it can take a lot of abuse.



The $79.95 Phantom advertises an 18dB boost and has a wider frequency range as there's no low pass filter. Its design lets you plug into the mic or your board or even inline with an additional cable (but why?). I tested with it plugged into my AIR but next time I'm on a remote, I'll check both ways.


Looking at the picture of my interface, note the positions of the input pots: Channels 1 (4.5) was the Broadcast, 2 (7) was the Phantom, 3 (9.25) was with no booster installed.

Screen Shot 2022-11-10 at 2.21.54 PM.png (3.76 MiB) Viewed 1788 times

Bottom line: I'll order another Phantom from Amazon @ $69.50 but I won't return the Broadcast that I bought used. I have other mics and interfaces so it might be handy to have one in the gig bag.

[daniel.sneed]

I use Fethead and Fethead phantom for years now.
Very good experience with dynamic mics (RE27ND, 565SD, 545SD,...) and condenser mics (with and without transformer) (Oktava mk220 and mk 012, ...).
To my ears: just gain and no noise.
My go-to when working with low level sounds.

[EMRR]

Cool, glad those are working out.