I sent this email to Jerry Chamkis this morning. Thought i would share it with everyone. Some of the info is rehashed, but some of it wasn't in the previous posts and I am also including a picture of the unit Jerry emailed me. I am going to have Jerry start building me one asap
MY EMAIL:
"Hi,
I am potentially interested in purchasing a new Aerco MP-2
Preamp. First of all, are you still manufacturing them? Secondly,
is it possible that you could email me some info on the unit? I'm
looking for specs, price, photo, etc...
I would want one with the variable gain option if possible.
Looking forward to your response,
- John"
HIS RESPONSE:
"Hi John-
Attached are a couple of not-very-good pix of the preamp. It's
really high on my list to get the website in order but there just
never seems to be time.
As you can see from the pix, it's built in a rugged die-cast
aluminum case so it's safe to bang around and very well shielded
against RF interference. It's a little over 3 x 4 x 1.3 inches and
has three internal 9 volt batteries that will run a self-powered
mic for ~40 hours continuous or a high-consumption 48 volt phantom
powered mic for ~10 hours continuous. Of course the run times are
longer for intermittent use. The batteries are in parallel and
there is a built-in switching power converter to provide +/- 16
volts for the preamp and 48 volts for the mic, so you can also feed
10 - 20 volts DC in an external coaxial power jack on the side.
The external power jack is floating so you can use a positive or
negative or no ground system so it's very flexible about sharing
camera or other available power.
The inputs are on gold-plated Neutrik XLR connectors and it uses
Reichenbach input transformers- the very best. Outputs are
single-ended on RCA jacks because the recorder is usually very
close by. Input noise is right at the theoretical minimum (for
room temperature) at -127 dBm. Frequency response is within a
half-dB from below 10 Hz to over 60 KHz. Distortion is on the
order of .01% at normal levels and rises to .1% at +10 dBm at 20
Hz. There is no problem having continuously variable gain
controls, the nominal range is 50 dB. There are two options for
the input transformer so you can have 0 - 50 dB gain for rock &
roll or 20 - 70 dB for nature recording.
Sorry this info isn't more readily available on my naked web site,
feel free to ask if you have any other questions. They're custom
built, usually take about 3 weeks and cost $750 including ground
shipping.
Cheers-
--
Jerry Chamkis
jchamkis@bga.com"