PAIA Vacuum Tube Preamps?

[EleKtriKaz]

I've heard these are pretty good for the price. It's a kit and you build them yourself. Any opinions would be apprectiated.

[Lame Thrower]

Hey EleKtriKaz, welcome to the board.

I was looking into these a while ago too, and asked about them here.

One thing you may or may not know about these and most other inexpensive "tube" preamps is that they use the tube only to color the sound, instead of being part of the amplification process. It's called a "starved plate" design. It makes it almost more of an effects box than a tube preamp.

However, if you enjoy electronic DIY projects, you can add another flavor to your arsenal on the cheap, and have a little fun doing it.

Seeyuh!

[EleKtriKaz]

Thanks for the help. I found out about them from a friend who uses one and really likes it, but I didn't know much more about it. Do you know of any moderately priced preamps that are not starved-plate designs?

[Lame Thrower]

I believe the Peavey VMP-2 is the lowest priced true tube design available at the moment. It's about $5-700.

I think I heard Bellari makes one as well. Don't know much about that one.

Don't be afraid of solid state though.

Seeyuh!

[jitteringjim]

EleKtriKaz:

I've seen the PAiA kits & am intersted in them also. (Thanks to a mention from another member on this BBS.) I'm planning on getting the solid state kit & building it. I'm hoping that as I building, I'll also be learning a little about what the hell I'm doing. Afterwards, if this great experiment is successful, I plan to modify it. (The presumption being that I have learned something about electronics.)

I'm really not interested in the starved plate design, but understanding a little about how the circuits work may help in putting together a real tube cicuit.

Please, no laughter from the peanut gallery.

[crawdad]

I built both the PAIA tube preamp and the "TubeHead". You can get some interesting colors out of them for certain things, but I have a hard time getting enough gain without noise from my Tube Mic-pre, even after doing some mods on it that were suggested by PAIA. I used the Tubehead for a while, running my CD player through it to give a little warmth to the CD's. That worked pretty well.

They are fun kits to build and they'll get your soldering skills up as well as teaching you some things about electronics in general. Maybe you could do some mods and take them to the next level.

[Hawk Studio]

If you want to get a real close look at building this kit, here is a rather in-depth construction articles with pictures.

PaIA TubeHead

[pohaku]

Another true tube option, besides the VMP-2 and the Brick, is the predecessor to the Brick the GT MP-1. It is single channel tube pre with DI, hi-pass, pad and phase reversal. They show up used every now and then from $250 to $500. I've got two of them bought off of e-bay for about $250 each. They do require a separate power supply (same one used for the old GT MD series mics) so make sure you get the power supply and cable with it if you find one. Very nice and very hi-fi pre. They also made a matching tube EQ -- the EQ1 -- which is also quite cool.