This video has been circulating and i think there are flaws in his analysis and comparison. In his video, he mentioned a course on how he did the tests and maybe an instruction to replicate how he gets the tones from the Scarlett 2i2?

I was wondering what you guys think and if we can get our hands on the course he mentioned.

 

It was being discussed in this thread, but the discussion died down pretty quickly: https://audiosex.pro/threads/jim-lill-is-back.84831/

It's bogus, he got two Class AB interfaces and made up what he thinks is a vintage Neve sound into one of them. I would say he's purposefully dishonest, but I think he might just be dumb. Or both.

I also haven't checked his "plugin" (it's a bluecat script, not a proper plugin), and I'm fairly positive it doesn't model any behavior. Just straight linear analysis of each band. Which makes me think he's just dumb, since he thinks it's better than UAD or Waves.

Other people will probably come in here and try to gaslight you into believing his results, but those people think these devices are black boxes and that his results are gospel. He measures a clean preamp and gets a clean preamp, that's the video.

 

He even measures two clean preamps and that's indeed the point.

 

Last edited: Jun 22, 2026 at 3:09 PM

Not sure if you are agreeing or disagreeing, but he very clearly seems to be looking for characteristics in that preamp that no one ever attributed to it. That's pretty much the Focusrite grandpa there.

 

He's being dishonest and made perfect rage bait where he can ultimately play dumb if called out, but got attention he can monetize, donations for his cause, sell courses and potentially a plugin.

This is typical, buy my course to get out of the matrix kind of thing, from A to Z, exposing the truth, they have been lying to you, never done before and whatever. And there's people who truly believe nobody ever did A/B testing of pre's before, ones who suddenly feel relived and enlightened, folks who think Neve pre was the missing link and ones that think anyone that owns Neve is complete idiot that just have money for it, ones that get rise/dopamine fix seeing him sticking it to the man while fueling him with donations. One eyed man is king among blind, it's still relatable to them even if all turns out to be flawed, he was just dumb as they are and applaud the effort, he just can't lose with these folks, they are perfect audience for this.

 

I think the core of the debate is that he disregards very small differences or differences when pushed to limits. That makes both sides have a valid point. At the same time is quite the disregarded fact.

So for me it gets a weak pass. The best is that is fun to watch a DIY guy. The worst is that "people will get mad" thumbnail that made me want to kick his ballz for a brief moment.

Edited: I forgot he's selling courses as @Melodic Reality said. Another bad point for him

Edited v2: yo, @Balisani ! I just posted this, another post you can downvote. You're welcome, glad to be of help

BTW, at least don't downvote the one where I praise a really good album from a fellow member. I don't mind downvoting sprees, but that's crossing a line man... #respectForTheMusicians

 

Last edited: Jun 22, 2026 at 4:57 PM

I think the tests are legit, just incomplete.

I heard somebody saying that he should've shared the raw files because the video editing sucks and Jim himself says you should have access to raw files. Also that some important details of the tests were left unclear, which you know, fair enough.

Doesn't help that he presents the information in a bit of an inflamatory way (that's youtube for ya). But since this video came out i've seen people make their own tests and found similar results, like a guy on YT who tested different impedances and found out pretty much what Jim said BUT also found out that the differences in time domain were pretty big (which Jim never tested). See that's useful, gimme more of that.

Also aren't most of us here because we can't pay for a $30 plugin? Why are we talking about thousend dollar preamps? We broke man.

 

Jim: people will get mad
Xupito: *gets mad*

Watch out. We got some Nostradamus shit going on in here, fellas.

 

That's the impression I've got after letting it simmer for a few days. It feels too good to be true, but I like to give him the benefit of having stumbled on this gold mine by pure luck. At the same time, YouTube is clearly a money thing for him. This video is a new low since it not only gets ad revenue and his usual PayPal link, but it also sells a course that he isn't qualified to be selling. He's just a dude who googled a lot, his knowledge is clearly lacking in all departments.

That was my stance before I looked into the preamp and found out it's just a Class AB pre. The output transformer received the signal already hard clipped, and that's by design since Neve wanted it pristine. And that makes complete sense, the best modern console is a Neve, and it's pristine clean, he got exactly what he wished for. It just happens that we got the 1073 while he was pursuing that, and the sound of the 1073 became legendary for the opposite reason.

Anyway, the most interesting thing about the video is that he never goes into harmonic analysis or Hammerstein models, I find it very difficult to be talking about "the Neve sound" without purposefully being ignorant about harmonics. And seeing that he did google a lot to make this video, it's curious to see him pretending that the machine is a black box and presenting it as such. But hey, it worked wonders. The little guy feels vindicated now, and all they do is say "but Jim tested it".

All I hope is that Dan Worrall comes back to dispell this thing. It's sad to see people in the comments correlating Jim with Dan. They wouldn't survive the video where he makes EQ in Reaktor.

 

Right now I've got an oldish Neve 1073 DPA, a Daking Mic Pre One, a first run Warm Tonebeast and an RME UCX II. None of the preamps sound the same when pushed and I never want to hear Lill's voice ever again.

 

Exactly, I couldn't even believe someone would actually do little to no research about this, just follow some gospel about Neve pre's, then decide to get 31105 out of all things without doing any further research, while there's info about about it already, cases of people thinking about getting 31105 for 1073 thing, being told it's not going to work, even AI summary going about the difference, Rupert interviews, it's kinda hard to not type any of this into Google and avoid all that info.

Still there's a guy totally online, digging through forums, getting all kind of answers and still managed to not find all the info. But it's somehow able to code a plugin, conduct scientific test's and geek out about everything, yeah. Not only that, but he didn't find usual occurrence where people drive these things, but somehow finds some strange evidence that they don't.

Conducts biased test, attacks bunch of straw man to discredit everyone and end up selling course, asking for donation and pitching his EQ to developers, I did the measurements nobody else have (like UAD, Waves, Plugin Alliance can't do the same), you do the plugin and copy protection, I'm just dumb musician, bla bla bla I invested few months of rent without any actual research while doing scientific research to prove my point... it's just not adding up. He's content creator, this isn't some dumb anon that did this and posted on some forum, plenty of research went into that video, plenty of editing, plenty of time to figure out everything, but still he decided to go with all of that and in that condescending and deceiving way. In the end of the day, he easily can sell that 31105, make his money back, earn money making content with it, that's how this goes.

I'm not buying dumb musician thing for a second or that was the way this all went, most people would first book actual studio to see what a fuss is about, it's much cheaper way to scratch that itch, then get a hardware, realize whole path of the console was adding all the magic and single strip isn't really giving him that, then get even more disappointed after testing with Focsurite, then going through all that rabbit hole, that I could believe, but none of what he presents there, it's just too dumb and appropriate.