Rolling your own tubes can be a fun way of improving the sound of cheaper gear that you may have lying around. I had a little experiment in tube rolling recently and will share my results with you.

For those of you who have any type of tube based gear lying around the house, this one is for you. The craze of vintage style gear using older technologies (such as tubes, ribbons, etc.) has taken the home audio world by storm. A few years back, I fell prey to this craze and bought a pretty cheap (for the time) ART TPS II dual channel preamp. It always got the job done, but never had what I would call a "sparkling" sound, just sort of a fuzzy, throaty kind of sound when the tube drive was turned on. Granted, this little thing was halfway decent when just using the solid state part of the preamp. There was no major noise when the preamp was turned up or anything like that. But, I wanted something with a bit more true to life sound quality offering more depth and detail.

Well, I put the thing in the rack and for a few years barely turned it on. I started adding more microphones to my collection and began to get curious about this little box again. So, I pulled it back out, cranked it up, and started testing it out again. This time, it sounded more workable to my more trained ears than it did in years past. I guess a little knowledge can change a piece of gear in big ways!

So, I started experimenting with it on different mics and different sources to hear the results. A couple of ribbon mics (also older technology that found its way into my studio) were added to my arsenal and I needed more gain than my recording interface could realistically offer. So, I cranked up the old ART again with its theoretical 75+dB of gain and started playing with the tube/valve settings and the +20dB gain button. Granted, the starved plate design of this preamp didn't give me exactly the sound I was after, but it did add some warmth and drive to the sound while also giving me enough juice to drive even the lowest output ribbon mic I had.

I remembered discussions of "rolling tubes" in gear to try to improve sound quality and thought back to the ART. I got hold of some vintage tubes that would work in this particular preamp and started swapping. In the bunch was a vintage Westinghouse 12AX7 tube that apparently seemed to like the ART's output gain path. The preamp had sounded good enough before with the stock Chinese made parts, but this tube/valve was a noticeable improvement over the stock parts when using the tube/valve drive with muich more clarity and better breakup.

Nice...

So, for the price of a tall cup of Starbucks, this guy was able to roll his way into an improved entry level preamp that is more than just workable. I'm using this thing much more frequently now and am much happier with the results I am getting with any mic I have been using.

On top of the solid state preamp and the tube gain stage, the two other features for this model are the Variable Valve Voicing (also called V3-with dialed in settings for output limiting) and the adjustable input impedance (the DPS II is the same preamp with a built in digital interface that will work up to 96kHz). The V3 offers some different tonal flavors, but I didn't find the OPL (output limiting) to be very musical, so I stray away from that. But, the input impedance is another story altogether. For something in this price range to feature adjustable imedance is uncommon, to say the least. But the additional colors this can offer, as well as the flexibility this offers with some mics that don't always play well with other gear, are major plusses for this 1U little preamp.

So, I started out talking about rolling tubes and wound up basically reviewing the ART TPS II. Sorry for wandering, but this little box still surprises me for the money and sometimes I just have to let it out!

Thanks for reading...