Warm Audio

Bryce Young started building vintage-style preamp kits in his garage in 2007 and sold them on eBay before turning the hobby into Warm Audio in 2011, based out of Austin, Texas. The company's whole premise is recreating classic studio hardware at a fraction of the original price — the WA-87 and WA-47 microphones echo Neumann's U 87 and U 47, and the WA-76 and WA-2A compressors do the same for the 1176 and LA-2A — built around custom transformers and hand-inspected before shipping. That same approach carried over into guitar pedals, recreating well-known overdrive and compressor circuits at a lower price than the originals. We cover most new Warm Audio pedal releases. Here's what we've written.