MusicRadar

Sonora looks and feels like a serious piece of kit.

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• Review

Out of the box, the Sonora inspires confidence and looks and feels great.

The preamps are housed in a solid satin-black metal desktop housing that belies its price. The switchgear feels spot on, with no wobbly pots or cheap-feeling switches.

Power is supplied to the Sonora via a separate power unit, the SPS-3. First you switch on the power supply, then the Sonora itself that has a bright blue power LED to signify that it's ready for sonic action.

While we were initially surprised that Sontronics chose to go with a large external power supply rather than with a built-in one, it makes sense for two main reasons.

Firstly, it reduces electro magnetic interference, making its way into the signal path (thus improving the subjective sound quality) and secondly, it means the preamp box can be made smaller and lighter for sitting on desktops and for transporting.

Overview

Moving swiftly onto the front panel, you'll find two identical channels. Each provides simple connectivity and switching, including a stepped preamp gain control with a huge 60dB of gain, (stepped in 5dB increments) a high-pass filter that rolls off at 75Hz for eliminating low-end rumble, a -20 pad for taming very hot sources a phantom power switch and, finally, an instrument jack input and a balanced female XLR input for mic/line sources.

Output-wise, there's a choice of XLR or jack per channel on the rear panel.

Very basic metering is provided in the form of a green LED to let you know a signal is passing, and a red LED to indicate that the preamp is approaching clipping.

Unfortunately, there's no ground lift or phase flip. However, with such a small footprint, we can't really see how Sontronics could have crammed in any more.

Preamp

The preamp is a discrete, solid-state, class-A affair (x2) that's based loosely on vintage designs.

To our, ears it sounds great. We'd describe the overall character as dark, vintage and round. Testing the Sonora side-by-side with our trusty Avalon U5 preamp DI (using our Fender Rhodes Piano) the Avalon brought out the bell-like tones in a very detailed way, while the Sonora sounded 'fatter', rounding out the top end more in a way that we would expect from older vintage pres.

We know that the Avalon is very transparent, modern-sounding and generally true to the source, while the Sonora seems more coloured (in a nice way) and certainly enhances the low end of instruments more.

However, it still manages to capture attack transients in sounds superbly, and you'd be forgiven for thinking that you were running your gear through an old expensive preamp, albeit one with very low noise that's been recently serviced and recapped!

You can also really jack the gains with the character staying consistent throughout the gain range. At the same time, there's little noise leaking through into the signal path – the mark of a well-made piece of kit.