The karacter 500 is a box full of vibrant colors. It covers a complete spectrum including mastering-grade saturation, tube-inspired distortion and glorious destruction. Gone are the days when only racks full of outboard gear could achieve these elusive and highly desirable styles of tonal coloration.
The entire unit is designed with discrete class-A topology, so even the most lo-fi sounds will benefit from the karacter’s high-end touch. Enhance your tracks or decimate everything – It’s a matter of karacter.
Build Quality
The karacter 500 is all about details.
Every single of its many aspects – sound, features, circuitry, components, design, materials, manufacturing – has been thought over and over until there was just nothing left to improve. Basically, every single part of our fine products is custom, and most of these are made according to our own designs and specs.
Only the best components the market has to offer are good enough for the karacter, and it shows. Each of our product is manually built to order and tested by ourselves, here at our headquarters in Germany.
Our product benefits sum up in an audio quality that is beyond all doubt. Even when extreme settings are used, the sound always stays clean and powerful.
Four Channel Configurations
This enormously creative tone-shaping solution offers two separate channels which can be set up for dual mono, linked stereo or linked and unlinked M/S operation. Three different coloration styles can be chosen from, and integrated mix stages for parallel signal processing as well as the unique Color Control add further versatility.
Mastering-Grade Saturation
The karacter 500 can add unobtrusive coloration and thickness to your music by applying subtle (or less subtle) amounts of symmetrical clipping. This mode has a soft characteristic curve and focuses on the uneven harmonics (h3, h5, …). Remember you can always use the mix controller to blend any desired amount of saturation with your original dry path for even further signal integrity.
karacter 500 gives you ultimate flexibility in terms of configuring its channels:
Dual Mono:
This gives you two fully independent channels of saturation/distortion/destruction – two units in one! This is of course the right mode to process two completely different signals at the same time. Or to send the output of channel 1 into channel 2 for even further mangling… if you dare.
Stereo Link:
In this mode, both channels are linked and controlled by just a single set of controls for comfortably processing stereo sources. The left controllers and switches become the master for both channels. The obvious benefit is that you don’t have to compare and match the settings of your left and right channels all of the time when processing stereo material.
M/S Unlinked:
This gives you the option to process the mid and the side signals completely independent from each other. Then, left becomes mid channel and right becomes side channel. You can apply a high amount of saturation to the mid and leave the sides completely untouched, or the other way round, or anything in between… Different settings of the gain controllers can be used to create subtle or significant changes within the stereo spectrum.
M/S Linked:
The linked M/S mode might seem a little odd, as the behavior seems to be exactly the same as in linked stereo mode. It can still have its benefits, though, as the inevitable divergences between left and right channel which are caused by natural component tolerances will be reduced in this mode, because here the side information of both channels is processed in a single audio path.
