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| German Distribution Hub: | 1 |
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1-year warranty & 30-day money-back guarantee included
If you decide your order isn't suitable for any reason you can return it - just let us know within 30 days of receiving it. Please keep hold of all the original packaging until you're sure you want to keep the order.
Eligibility for Money Back Guarantee
Important: For hygiene and software licensing reasons, some items are only eligible for our Money Back Guarantee if they are returned to us unused and sealed in the original packaging with all software still "unregistered." Details of exclusions are shown within the product descriptions. Products include:
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We can collect your return for a small fee, or you can send it back to us yourself. The collection fee can be found in the returns information on each product's page on Gear4music.
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This table provides an overview of your statutory consumer rights, compared with our standard returns policy and optional extended money back guarantee and warranty.
| UK & Europe | EU Standard | Gear4music Standard | Gear4music Optional |
|---|---|---|---|
| Return Period | 14 days | 30 days | up to 180 days |
| Standard delivery charges refunded? | Yes | Yes | Yes, up to 30 days |
| Upgraded delivery charges refunded? | Standard costs only | Standard costs only | Standard costs only |
| Free collection on cancellation | No | No | Yes, up to 30 days |
| Free collection if defective, delivered damaged or incorrect item | Yes, within 14 days | Yes, within 14 days | Yes, within 30 days |
We are unable to accept returns of any custom made items designed to work together as a unique package and some items are only eligible for money back guarantee if they are returned to us unused and sealed in the original packaging. For full information on our returns policy, please refer to our returns and refunds information guide.
Key Features
The Golden Age Premier GA-8000 is a boutique tube-driven microphone. Equipped with state of the art components and parts throughout, the GA-8000 delivers best in class audio performance with unrivalled balance and clarity within your recordings. Boasting a state of the art semiconductor active cooling system, you can enjoy peace of mind knowing that the NOS CIFTE 6AU6 tube will perform to the best of its abilities whilst offering an unrivalled signal to noise ratio.
Aerospace-quality ROGERS ceramic circuit board is mounted with hand-made Japanese and German parts to produce a full-range frequency response with a neutral sound that offers no imparting colouration. Ideal for recording even the most delicate of instruments, the extended low-end and articulate high-end make it the perfect candidate for unlocking the signature hip-hop and R&B vocal sound of the '90s.
Nearly New: This product may have been opened for quality control purposes, returned by a customer, refurbished, or may have non-essential parts or software missing. Otherwise, the product operates as new. This is a great opportunity to buy a fully functioning product at a discounted price.
Product Ref: 228400
A residual side-effect of tube-driven microphones and equipment is the resulting heat that comes from long periods of use. Ignoring the quality and character that tubes introduce to your signal, the heat can become a problem in controlled environments where the sound quality is picked up microscopically, such as professional studios. To combat the negative effects of the tube stage, the GA-8000 makes use of a semiconductor active cooling unit to produce the best signal-to-noise ratio possible, while keeping the microphone at safe operating levels.
The tube is mounted to an aluminium casing with the semiconductor attached to the bottom. The heat that is generated is transferred to the reverse side of the semiconductor and passes through the aluminium alloy heat sink. This heat sink is where the heat is dissipated into the cooling chip, resulting in clean and consistent power to the tube, with superb audio performance without the danger of overheating and breakage.
The small details are the building blocks of what makes a microphone great. With the GA-8000, there's no shortage of premium parts and components wherever you look, culminating in a stunning final product that's rightfully a modern-day studio classic. A Rogers ceramic gold-plated circuit board is used, where typically this is reserved for high-end aerospace communications, coupled with capacitors, resistors and wires that are hand-crafted in Japan and Germany. The GA-8000’s metal resistors and electrolytic capacitor are special audiophile audio types sourced from Japan, as too is the oxygen-free connecting wires. The coupling capacitors and solder are Siemens EPCOS from Germany. Sparing no expense, each part of the microphone exudes class and prestige.
To capture the essence of the sound of classic 90's vocal production, the GA-8000 needs to be equipped with a state of the art capsule to produce the same characteristics and response as microphones of the past. To do this, several original 90's microphones were disassembled and supplied to a trusted industry manufacturer, with over 20 years of microphone production experience, to accurately capture the details of the original studio essential mics.
The result is a microphone with a near-identical sonic character with more modern additions such as improved sound pressure level and noise floor. And with both cardioid and omnidirectional polar patterns, you'll have plenty of flexibility when it comes to recording techniques.
Not imparting any bias to any frequency range, the Golden Age Premier GA-8000 is an open window into the exact character of the source that you're recording. A supremely clean and clear rendition of each instrument is perfectly encapsulated, devoid of any unwanted resonances or distortion. This ultra-clean sound lends itself perfectly to a wide range of sound sources, whether that's vocals, piano, acoustic guitar, the best-in-class signal to noise ratio provides bountiful headroom. Coupled with a tremendous SPL level rating, the GA-8000 will find a place in every session you take.
In long gruelling sessions in the studio, microphones can often be used to near breaking point. Set up for multiple different instruments and left to record all day, the tubes inside a microphone come under high stress when tracking for a project. To ensure that you always get the best performance from your GA-8000 microphone, Golden Age Project make use of a NOS (new-old-stock) CIFTE 6AU6 tube. This tube produces an anode voltage of 90V, much higher than the average 35-50V, meaning there will be more heat within the circuit. Crucially, the active semiconductor cooling system effectively dissipates the heat to preserve the life of your tube without compromising on any of the desired character and response of a driven tube.
An essential part of any tube-driven microphone is the power supply. Employing a modern design, the GA-8000 power supply uses FET-based stabilisation for the high-voltage rail. While many people may not notice, the type of circuit used in the power supply does affect the overall sound of the microphone. To that, Golden Age conducted countless tests between different circuit types including tube rectifying and solid-state FET to find what worked best for the GA-8000. Delivering a smoother tone and more pleasing upper mid-range, FET circuitry was opted for. As a bonus, this circuitry means you don't need to worry about replacing faulty or old tubes within the power supply.
