Recording - August 2014 - 62

BY MIKE METLAY WITH DARWIN GROSSE

For some time now, French firm Two
Notes Audio Engineering has been gaining attention for its Torpedo line of studiofriendly guitar products, and we jumped at
the chance to review the Torpedo Reload,
a box that is designed to do several different guitar-recording jobs, separately or all
at once. You can plug a guitar directly into
it and use it as a direct box; you can use it
as a load box to simulate an amp's connection to a speaker cabinet, letting you

Two Notes Audio Engineering
Torpedo Reload and Wall Of Sound
Can a practical guitar recording solution still retain the magic of a miked amp?
drive your amp hard while recording to an
audio interface at lower volume (or even
silently); and you can send recorded tracks
back through it and reamplify them. That's
not anything new in and of itself, but how
the Reload does it is of major interest.
Features on the outside
The Reload is a pretty heavy box.
Measuring 12 x 7.2 x 3.5 inches, it weighs
nearly 9 pounds; there's some big iron in
here. The front panel is fairly simple, with a
DI Instrument Input, knobs marked Replay,
Speaker, and Contour, a switchable 15 dB
pad for the Loadbox Out, LEDs to indicate
the chosen load impedance (4, 8, or 16
ohms), and LEDs for signal present/clipping at the Instrument, Replay, and Speaker
inputs. A set of three LEDs provide visual
feedback for the Match feature, which we'll
get to later.
The rest of the front panel is taken up by
the grille of a really big fan whose exhaust
is on the rear panel, next to a variety of ins
and outs. There's a Speaker Input for a signal from an amplifier, with switchable
4/8/16 ohm impedance; two Speaker
Outputs for running signal from the Reload
to cabinets; two balanced XLR outputs, one
from the load box and one from the DI;
and 1/4" input and output for the Replay
reamplification system, the line input on
balanced TRS and the output on unbalanced TS, just as an amp would want to
see. Each of the balanced outputs and the
Replay input has its own ground lift switch,
and the unit has a large internal power
supply with a conventional IEC cable.
62

RECORDING August 2014

Magic on the inside
Two Notes incorporates a technology it
calls Re-Act, for "Reactive-Active," to control
the impedance your amp is seeing at any
given moment. The reasoning behind Re-Act
is that most power attenuators mess with
your tone, a little or a lot, because turning
the volume up and down causes the impedance seen by the amp to change. The ReAct technology prevents this; no matter how
you turn the volume up or down, the amp
sees the same impedance all the time, just
as if it was connected to its own speakers.
The result is a consistent tonal response
regardless of speaker output level.
Using the Reload is pretty straightforward,
because a lot has been built into the box to
prevent blowing up your amp or shredding
your speakers, all while preserving the best
possible tone. You unplug the cable between
your amp and your cabinet, and insert the
Reload in between them using the Speaker
In and Out jacks. Be sure to set the right
impedance so your amp is happy (especially if it's a tube amp). If you wish, you can
also send the Loadbox Out to your mic preamp or audio interface. Then just plug your
guitar into your amp and play as usual.

The Speaker knob lets you control the
actual volume of your speakers without compromising your amp's "sweet spot", so you
can get as loud or as soft as you wish in the
tracking room while keeping your best tone.
Since our ears' frequency response is loudness-dependent (oh those pesky Equal
Loudness Contours!), the Contour knob lets
you dial in either a midrange-heavy Vintage
tone or a bassy, trebly Modern tone, either
to compensate for what you lose at low volume or to creatively tweak the sound of your
amp. Thanks to the second Speaker Out,
you can safely plug in additional speakers
and/or different speakers than your regular
amp's, all with different impedances, to create and mike different tones than you'd get
from the amp alone.
Let's Replay that again
When you use the Replay (reamplification) feature of the Reload, the Match
function helps you get the exact response
to your amp that you'd normally get from
playing your guitar itself into it. Basically,
Match listens to the real guitar and the
reamp input and compares them. You
play the guitar into the DI input of the

Recording - August 2014

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