As the producer/composer behind the sound of hit games, including James Bond: Quantum of Solace and Call of Duty 3, as well as promo trailers for I Am Legend and Watchmen, Rob King’s California-based Green Street Studios is constantly busy. The facility boasts racks of high-end outboard gear, but King names to the Manley Slam! as his preferred stereo limiter and mic preamp.

‘Out of all the gear in my studio, the Slam! gets used more often than almost anything else,’ he reports. ‘I’ve often said it’s a shame more people don’t have the opportunity to hear what it can do. I do a lot of dialogue production in games, and I find that the Slam! is the ultimate signal path for a voiceover.

‘Particularly in doing dialogue within a game, it’s always tricky to get things to sit right in the mix,’ he continues. ‘Running the dialogue through the Slam!, I usually just set the input and output gains to 12 o’clock, with the heel of the limiter anywhere between 18dB and 22dB, and I literally never have to touch it. Whether it’s whispering, shouting, screaming, talking – it all sits there perfectly, with no distortion, no audible compression.’

King singles out the Slam!’s optical compressor as one feature that sets it apart: ‘The Slam! gets a real tube preamp kind of sound,’ he says. ‘It’s got a ton of clarity, it’s super smooth, and so rich in frequency. You get all the lows, all the highs, and zero sibilance – I’ve never had to even think about a de-esser.’

Whether for spoken word dialogue or for music production, King says the Manley Slam! delivers more than enough compression with a minimum of coloration: ‘I have a lot of compressors in the studio, and I like them all for their different sound,’ he states. ‘But the Slam! is really nothing like anything else. It is so clean and natural sounding. It’s like a compressor that doesn’t sound like a compressor. Nothing will get something to its place and keep it there naturally as the Slam! does.’

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