Garthrr wrote:
In article , (Scott Dorsey)
writes:
I had one for audition. Same thing as the original Tube MPA inside,
really. IC front end, cheesy tube stage with 50V on the plate. Very
smeary sounding... totally eliminates midrange detail.
Is there anything that could be done inexpensively to improve the Pro MPA? Is
there a "real preamp" in there waiting to come out or would it be a substantial
rebuild? I have one laying around and it hardly ever gets used except for
scratch vocals etc. It would be nice to be able to use it. Any way to goose up
the plate voltage or something?
Not really. There honestly isn't anything much in there worth doing much
with.
The $200 Bellari isn't a bad starting point for a project, though. It's
got a transformer front end and a real tube gain stage in front. It's not
a very good transformer and it's got a very wimpy power supply driving that
tube gain stage (and the IC drive stuff afterward is kind of doubtful), but
at least you're starting with a general topology you can work with.
With the Aphex 107, you can bypass the tube stage. You lose only about 10 dB
of gain and it sounds a whole lot better. But my attempts at doing this with
the ART weren't really very successful.
--scott
--
"C'est un Nagra. C'est suisse, et tres, tres precis."