Quote:
Originally Posted by jimmorgan
I'm as much into playing with cool gear as the next person, but unless you are willing to cart around the rest of the signal chain, including some high dollar speakers to reproduce the nuances of that studio grade sound, nobody, including yourself, is going to pick up on the tube warmth through your average set of bar room speakers.
Most places you'd be taking all that gear and then running a line out into the preamp of a cheap Behringer or Yamaha mixer or something.
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Yea, that’s why I included the caveat that it definitely seems like overkill for someone just doing smaller gigs, I do generally play through very high end PA systems, and I already have the equipment so, for me, it makes sense to have some fun.
I sort of hijacked the thread with all of my dreaming... to steer things back to the question at hand, my arguement was simply that if you’re spending $1000 on a Felix and $600 on a Firefly to put in the fx loop for “tube warmth” you are already combining two great preamps- one a transparent solid state and the other a “tube” DI. In the end you get two blendable channels and can add in some tube character from the Firefly- albeit in kind of a roundabout way. For the same money you can get a 4 channel studio grade preamp made by one of the most legendary names in audio on the planet that allows true blending of tube/solid state preamps, independently on each channel.
Additionally I believe the tube in the Firefly relies on what is called a “starved plate” power design in which the tube is not actually receiving the voltage it needs to operate at its full linear range. To be fair, I believe it receives more voltage than most starved plate designs because the voltage is internally stepped to 48v and you still get plenty of tube character and what not in your signal, however the dedicated tube pre in the UA operates at a much much higher voltage and is a true, all tube signal path so if you are looking for authentic tube character, it can’t be beaten.
To be sure, you miss out on the mute/tuner out/eq, but in my opinion, those can be solved relatively easily for what you’ve already sunk into a preamp. You do also have the benefit of an 1176 compressor on each channel and if you ask around I bet you would be hard pressed to find an engineer who would frown at a light dose of 1176 to polish and tighten up an acoustic.
I dunno, obviously this isn’t gonna be for everyone- or maybe even anyone. Like Doug said, this was thinking out of the box in response to an interesting request. For me, it has provided a fun opportunity to brainstorm ways to get a little closer to that holy grail.