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PreSonus TubePre - $110 (Austin)
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Although the manual provides no figure for the actual operating voltage for the 12AX7, PreSonus tell me that it runs at 48V, which, despite being rather less than the 300 or so volts you'd expect to measure on more traditional valve circuits, is more than is found on many competing designs. In my experience, many such low-voltage tube preamps impart a softer sound when they're pushed into distortion, although this may be more to do with such units being designed to add this sort of character than to the tube operating voltage itself.
There are separate controls for overall gain and for the amount of 'tube drive', and an integral switch bypasses the tube drive when the knob is in its fully anti-clockwise position. Circular, illuminated VU level meters and associated clip LEDs complete the picture. THD + noise figure of better than 0.005 percent (unweighted), although when the tube kicks in, the distortion can be anything up to 30 percent. Again, that's not a bad thing, as the purpose of the tube here is to impart musically pleasing distortions! The signal-to-noise ratio is specified as better than 95dB, and on a subjective level is similar to what you'd expect from a decent analogue console preamp. Single channel, third-rack width TubePre