So Warm appears to have done it again.I had been lucky enough to pick up Warm Audio's WA76 from an online pro audio distributer a few days after they got them in, which was also -not so coincidentally- a few days before they sold out of them along with almost every other online dealer.

The 'all in' setting is fantastic, doing all the weird and wonderful things to the attack and decay that you would expect and overall it added that 'finished' sound to everything that went through it, which is why the originals are so sought after. It would beat scrabbling around the back! This solved the problem and made us think that maybe they could put that switch on the front panel between the gain knobs. That hit the input to the WA76 a bit too hard so we switched the input gain on the back panel and made up the level with the input gain.

On a couple of songs we used it on bass, really pushing the preamp to the point of saturation. The Warm did exactly what we expected and the little extra colour in those transformers warmed things up nicely. We had a particularly dynamic singer and in that situation we normally go for 8 or 12 to 1 ratio, slow the attack and give a medium release to try to smooth things out a bit.

Slightly more 'vintage' colour than the Purple, almost certainly due to those transformers, and somewhere between the two originals for its ability to make a drum sound pump. Now those three units all sound a little different due undoubtedly to their age and treatment by previous owners but they do all share that fundamental 1176 character that can really grab a sound and solidify it, and the attack and decay shaping possibilities that go with it. So, how does it sound? Well we took it to a tracking session where we were able to compare it directly to two original 1176s and a Purple Audio. 'The Warm did exactly what we expected and the little extra colour in those transformers warmed things up nicely' Making the PSU internal would up the price significantly and the PSUs it does use are of excellent quality so it's a wise choice. As with its free standing mic pres, the WA12 and the Tone Beast, Warm has put a hell of a lot of quality circuitry into this unit.

Warm audio wa76