The Empirical Labs Mike-E is a digitally controlled microphone preamp designed to deliver pristine, powerful, and musically rich recordings in modern studio environments. Whether feeding a DAW, digital recorder, or plugin chain, the Empirical Labs Mike-E ensures your signal starts strong, with a layout so intuitive that even beginners will quickly find their way around.
Built with Empirical Labs’ trademark attention to detail, the Empirical Labs Mike-E combines a transformer-coupled microphone preamp with extremely low self-noise and a unique compression and saturation section that adds harmonic colouration reminiscent of revered vintage analogue gear.
The mic preamp section uses a super low-noise transformer input amplifier with precise digital gain control. Signal-to-noise performance exceeds that of any microphone on the market, and gain is controlled via a custom-stepped design that avoids the reliability issues often found in ageing pots or detented switches. An onboard “Bad!” LED indicator warns when input levels are too high.
The heart of the Empirical Labs Mike-E’s distinct sound is the CompSat™ section, which features a multi-stage saturation and compression circuit. The Saturator uses soft clipping in multiple stages: low input levels apply gentle triode-style saturation, while higher levels trigger a more aggressive clipping circuit to tame peaks. The Compressor section is inspired by the Distressor, offering classic knee-style compression with its own flavour, and includes preset ratios of 2:1, 4:1, 8:1, and the extreme “Nuke” setting for high-impact dynamics control.
The Emphasis circuit boosts and soft clips high frequencies before compression, then attenuates them post-processing, improving clarity while enhancing signal-to-noise. This technique, originally used in analogue tape machines, allows for subtle or aggressive tonal shaping with minimal noise penalty.
Together, these elements make the Empirical Labs Mike-E an advanced front-end tool that captures source material with clarity, strength, and warmth, while offering flexible analogue-style character shaping.
