73 JR Preamp

The Design That Started It All, Finally Available As A Plugin

About 15 years ago, Peter Rodriguez, CEO of Heritage Audio, decided to use all his knowledge as a music producer and engineer to recreate his favourite microphone preamp with a few improvements, all while sparing no cost on materials.

Back then, the pro audio industry only offered overpriced vintage equipment or attempts to recreate the style of classics, but skimping on materials or incurring design flaws.

No manufacturer, large or small, was able to bring the real thing to the public until the first Heritage Audio units - whose name the team at Heritage Audio do not wish to recall - came onto the market and revolutionised the industry forever. Since then, Heritage Audio’s design has become the industry standard vintage 73 style preamplifier, making it nearly ubiquitous in professional audio studios around the world. 

Try to find a rack without a 500 series 73 JR or 73 JR II, Elite Series or a Súper8.

You might think you’ve seen this one, or even own one already but trust the Heritage Audio team...you haven’t heard anything like it.

It took Heritage Audio's development team months to get the most out of their original units...Everything, from its input transformer, exclusive to the company, made in Carnhill´s Oxford factory, that is critical to the impact on the extra mojo of the hardware, to the custom made output Carnhill transformer made also exclusively for Heritage Audio at the St Ives factory, or the unique discrete Class A High-Pass Filter that just makes easier to tighten your low end without affecting desired frequencies. 

The only added feature to this perfect design is a blend knob, because it's so much fun to push this baby to the limit and do parallel gain staging right in the plugin. 

Being a plugin, you can have 1, 2, 24, 48 or as many needed…allowing you to create your own vintage mixer sound. This really is as good as it gets and Heritage Audio recommend comparing it to others…as they have already done. And you’ll surely see that this as close as it gets to the hardware units.

Features

• Finally, Heritage Audio’s 73 style preamp available as a plugin.
• Up to 80dB of gain in 5dB steps.
• All-discrete, Class A circuitry and custom Carnhill transformers modeled in-house by Heritage Audio.
• Blend screw for built-in parallel processing.
• Variable High-Pass Filter for cutting unwanted low-end rumble and mud.
• Separate input and output gain controls let you drive the input for saturation without overloading the output.

System Requirements

• Plugin formats: VST3, AU, AAX (64-bit).
• Platforms supported: Mac OS 10.15.7 and up (Both Intel and Native Apple Silicon M1/M2/M3 Compatibility). PC Windows 10 and 11.
• DAWs supported: All major DAWs, including Ableton Live, Pro Tools, Logic Pro, FL Studio, Cubase, Studio One, Bitwig, Reaper, Reason etc.