The venerable Hairball Audio Lola is a 500 series module that doubles as a mic preamplifier as well as a line input pre.  It is a modern reimagining of a popular British preamp that is famous for its low mid thickness and rich harmonic character.   Unhyped and natural sounding, there is no brittle harshness inherent in this piece.  In fact, it is quite good at taming the sounds of cheap, Chinese condensers.  With up to 65dB of clean gain, it is perfect for low sensitivity mics such as large diaphragm dynamics and passive ribbon elements.

It is a very versatile piece in large part thanks to its output T-pad potentiometer that allows you to control the output level while increasing the input gain to apply the appropriate amount of analog saturation and color desired without sucking the tone away or clipping your interface inputs.

The heart of these preamps are the pair of discrete op amps that come with every build.  Depending on your op amp choice the unit can react very differently.  This sales post is offering the choice between the Eisen Audio BA512 and DIY-990 op amps:

• The BA-512 discrete op amps were designed as a drop-in replacement for the BA440 amplifier circuits used in 70's broadcast consoles built by Neve.  They provide a very British flavor to the preamp which compliment the British style input and output transformers very well.  They react a little slower to transients but they provide a nice warm, colored character to signals that pass through them.
• The DIY-990 op amps are schematic accurate recreations of the famous Jensen/Hardy 990 style op amps.  They are fast and very accurate.  Sam Pura has made the Lolas famous with pairs of these op amps in them.  He uses them on all of his drum room recordings and they have proven to be quite integral to his drum tracking process by his own admission

As you can see from the pictures, the Lola comes with a built-in DI.  When you plug in an instrument cable, a relay automatically engages to disconnect the microphone input and connect the instrument signal from the 1/4" input in the front.  A FET powered buffer allows the instrument to power the differential input path of the input transformer, using the full signal path of the preamp to power your bass, guitar, or keyboard.

The 10 segmented LED meter allows you to monitor either VU or PPM mode.  The VU displays the average (RMS) level and PPM displays the true peak information of the signals passing through, very useful when checking just how high your snare, kick, or very transient oriented signal is peaking.

All units are built to order and we have no kits on hand, so please be aware that any and all stock issues experienced at Hairball at any given time will affect our ability to fill orders.

Due to the special order nature of this listing, once the kit(s) has been ordered from the manufacturer no refunds will be provided.  We will be dedicated to making sure you receive a fully functional unit in case your order arrives out of sorts, but refunds and returns will not be accepted.

Please let us know if you have any questions at all regarding these units or their operation.  Thank you very much for your time!