RHA1/CHA1- Simple but relevant sharing from a music producer
Nicolas Chen is the owner and director of W.G. Music Studio.
Nicolas is a professional music producer and music workstation recording engineer. Most of them are engaged in the recording and post-production of live symphonies and pop music bands. What’s even more special is that this year, he started to engage in live performance recording and post-production of live Atoms tracks. He also has a deep grasp of streaming music and multi-channel technology.
Before and after the epidemic, Nicolas held two very special “headphone live concerts”. That is, instead of using F.O.H. for sound reinforcement,the audiences wear headphones to listen. These include pop music bandand chamber music.
In these recording situations, Nicolas needs to monitor all the time. Even for headphone concerts, he has invested in many extremely high-end professional monitoring headphones, such as the Sennheiser HD-820 worth about US$1,650 in the photo.
For a professional recording engineer, the most important thing is not only to make the monitoring sound smooth and realistic, but also to conduct mastering analysis of the positioning and sound field required for various music pieces. Therefore, a headphone amplifier that meets the requirements of broadcast and television is essential. What’s more, most of the headphones used have high impedance, such as the HD-820’s impedance as high as 300Ω.
Another very important reason is that when using a workstation for recording and mastering, the headphone amplifier must not have any unnecessary line noise, such as white noise or AC noise.
Therefore, after UNiKA developed the RHA1 and CHA1 headphone amplifiers, Nicolas immediately caught his attention. After testing them, he decided to purchase them for daily work. In addition to RHA1 and CHA1 being able to meet the above needs, the most important reason is that their cost-effective is much higher than that others of high-end models in audio field whenever pro-audio or Hi-Fi. Those can even compete with products that are 5-10 times the price.
It is important to mention here that Nicolas usually uses UNiKA NBB-1616 with a music workstation for live sound check and recording at 96KHz or 192KHz. After using RHA1 and CHA1, Nicolas will be more comfortable in future work, so he specially shared the above experience and related photos.