[NPreAD] Art Tube MP Project Series tube preamp!

[Baloney Balderdash]

Been working on my amp-less setup for a while (for my 4 string 28,6" scale Ibanez Mikro Bass, tuned to G1 standard tuning, as in 3 half steps above regular E standard 4 string bass tuning, equipped with a DiMarzio Model P P pickup wired directly to the output jack socket, and run through an always on 1 octave up effect mixed with clean signal, giving an effect similar to an 8 string "octave" bass with pairs of respectively bass and octave strings), and I think it finally has reached it's final form with the arrival of the Art Tube MP Project Series tube preamp that I ordered from Thomann last Friday night.

I did however replace the "hand picked premium selected" ( ...yeah, right...  ) cheap Chinese stock tube, which had a prominent exquisite thin fizzy and harsh top tire Chinese premium crapiest of all crap tonal quality to it (which I suppose must have been the parameters Art instructed their official "tube hand-picker" in chief to aim for), with a proper quality Russian made EHX 12AX7EH preamp tube, which made a huge difference.

So the tube in this preamp is definitely no cheap gimmick (don't quite understand the reasoning behind Art choosing to save a fairly minimal amount of production bucks by equipping this preamp with a horrible sounding tube from factory though, as it definitely doesn't give the customers the right impression of the overall actual quality of the unit).

Though I am perfectly aware that this is in the cheaper end of tube preamps on the market, and that it utilizes a starved tube plate circuit, however I've read in a blog somewhere, written by someone who actually measured the tube plate voltage of this preamp, that it still runs at about 70V, which, while quite a bit more than most other starved tube circuits on the market, still is a long way up to the about 200 to 300V that, as far as I know, usually is considered the optimal plate voltage to run preamp tubes at.

Non the less it does a great job at adding a really nice touch of rich warm tube flavor and slight compression, just taking the upmost sharp edge of my bass signal (not to be confused with tone sucking), sort of rounding off the harshness of my signal in a really beautiful way, while still retaining the bite and zing of it.

 

This is how the Art Tube MP Project Series tube preamp looks :

 

This is the specs sheet :

 

And here's how my always on amp-less setup looks in it's entirety on written form :

TC Electronic SpectraComp (always on, fully customizable, 3 band, compressor) ->> Boss LS-2 [A+B Mix <-> Bypass] (parallel effect loops mixer/switch) ->> ={  [Loop A Send] ->> [Loop A Return] ->||<- [Loop B Send] ->> Joyo Orange Juice (always on, relatively low gain, Orange amp style, overdrive, that is always mixed with the clean signal from parallel effects [Loop A] at an about 60% Orange Juice/40% clean signal ratio) ->>  [Loop B Return] }=>> Zoom G1 Four (exclusively used as an always on EQ, utilizing five 1 band fully parametric equalizers to fine tune the tone by boosting the 63Hz, 200Hz, 250Hz, 400Hz, and 1khz frequency bands +1 to +2 dB) ->> Behringer BEQ700 Bass Graphic Equalizer (always on, with the 50Hz, 120Hz, 400Hz, and 800Hz band boosted ever so slightly (~ +1 to +2 dB), and the 4.5kHz and 10kHz band cut repsectively about -5dB and -15dB) ->> Art Tube MP Project Series (tube preamp) 

->> [ Either : ->> headphones preamp ->> headphones (for home practice) /Or/ ->> mixer/poweramp ->> PA speaker/full range cabinet (for band rehearsals/jamming/gigging) ] 

 

Edited November 21, 2020 by Baloney Balderdash