Lindell Audio LiNTEC

The Swedish manufacturer Lindell Audio has earned a first-class reputation as a "reinventor" of legendary outboard classics and, thanks to a whole raft of technological updates, the company manages to combine vintage mojo with the reliability of modern circuit concepts. Here, the classic Pultec has been remodelled, giving us the LiNTEC. The first thing everybody asks: Just how much "Pultec" can there be in an EQ that doesn't have a tube booster amplifier? An awful lot, is the surprising answer: Its combination of a high-quality op-amp and transformer is more than capable of delivering a very nicely "rounded" sound with convincingly vintage charm – it even feels right to the touch. And the occasionally troublesome downsides of the original are gone: There will be no follow-up costs due to burnt-out tubes, every unit produces the exact same sound, and of course it is significantly less expensive than an original Pultec or a tube clone.

The sound of a Pultec EQ is often described as being extremely "musical", part of which is down to the typical and distinctive colouring of the signal – that being said, users do have to genuinely want a sound like this, as it doesn't always suit every tonal context. In this respect, an EQ with these characteristics is always something of a specialist – for certain instruments and sounds on which it can quite deliberately leave its unmistakable mark. In most cases, the LiNTEC will cheerfully add both colour and character to more neutral-sounding setups, if required. It is simple to do this both during recording – as part of the recording signal chain – and in the mix. Thanks to its updated circuit technology, the LiNTEC EQ can easily be operated as a stereo pair and as such can also be used when working with a mix bus. It is also easy to imagine the LiNTEC being used as the only analogue device (or pair of devices) in a computer-based setup.