Cranborne Audio Camden 500 Series Preamp Overview

Cranborne Audio Camden 500 Series Preamp

A super transparent and detailed 500 series-sized mic, line and hi-z preamp with two saturation styles via the analogue Mojo circuit.

Astounding Versatility

The Cranborne Audio Camden 500 gives you the best of both worlds - utterly clean, linear and transparent or crunchy, colourful and characterful.

The Cranborne Audio Camden 500 is a seriously versatile mic, line and instrument preamplifier. This preamp was specifically designed to be the ultimate front-end for the present-day engineer and recording studio - professional or project. As you’d expect from Cranborne Audio, the Camden 500 can be seamlessly integrated into a modern workflow.

Thanks to its unique, custom-designed preamp topology, the Camden 500 preamp delivers exceptionally low-noise and low-distortion performance plus frequency and phase linearity at all gain settings. The end result is a pristinely clean and natural-sounding 500 Series preamp that can act as the perfect blank canvas for your audio sources, which you can colour with your chosen analogue and digital processors. If you want to imbue your signal with a vintage character of the British variety, simply turn up the Mojo knob to taste. It’s up to you!

Exceptional Sound, Any Position

What sets the Camden 500 Series preamp from the pack is its astounding performance at all gain values, from 8dB to 68dB. Even with the gain at its maximum setting, the THD stays inaudible whilst the Frequency and Phase response remains linear: Put simply, every position of the gain knob is usable for any mic combo or sound source.

Unique Mojo Circuit

Mojo is a analogue saturation circuit of Cranborne Audio’s design, that offers distinct two flavours of saturation - Thump and Cream.

By combining an assortment of filters and discrete second/third order harmonic generators, the Camden 500 can authentically recreate the sonic character of vintage transformer and valve-based gear. With just one knob, you can dial in as much warmth, fatness and character as you want. Compared to the destructive clipping offered by transformer and other legacy designs, Mojo sounds excellent at every setting - from beautifully subtle to saturated punch. The Mojo circuit can be totally bypassed to reveal the cleanliness and transparency of the Camden 500’s base sound.

Enrich Your Lows

Thump adds fullness to your sound sources by providing a boost to the low harmonics in the range of ~100Hz to 20Hz and below, exciting low-end content without increasing fundamental frequencies. This mode is particularly suited to low-frequency based instruments such as bass guitars or mono-synths.

Smooth Your Sound

The Cream style of saturation is a great way to make voices or instruments sit comfortably within a complex mix in a way that can’t be achieved with EQ. It achieves this by introducing a smooth, vintage quality that significantly increases THD and smooths out low-mid frequencies. The character of the Cream mode is affected by the harmonic signature of the sound source. For example, mid-range instruments will have their high-end forwardness enhanced whilst full-range source’s transients will experience a unique effect akin to compression.