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Sonora looks and feels like a serious piece of kit.

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Applications

Let's not forget that you get not one but two channels for your money with the Sonora. Coupled with a compact portable A/D D/A converter box, you potentially have a very compact and versatile DAW input and output system that could be used for almost any recording application, both in your home studio and on location.

The Sonora is also great for imparting some analogue warmth and fatness on digital recordings that are often very clear and punchy, but ultimately, lack a certain mojo. You could run your recordings out of your computer, through the Sonora and then back in.

Stereo operation couldn't be easier either, as each gain control is click stepped for reference matching.

Summary

To sum up, we really like this preamp. It's very well-built, exhibits very low noise and has a very musical character that's well-suited to just about any source.

It excels on spiky sources such as acoustic guitar, Clavinet and thin voices, rounding and fattening the sound while keeping those vital initial attack transients intact. It also makes a great stereo front-end for recording in and out of your computer – something we see as being one of its key uses.

For its first foray into preamp design and manufacture, we'd say that Sontronics has got the sound and balance of features almost spot on. It's a high-quality two-channel preamp DI at a reasonable price.