K
KhatPhat
New member
Those starved plate designs in budget tube preamps don't pump enough voltage/current through the tube to make it glow very brightly, so they backlight it with an LED to give it the illusion that it's really heating up the tube. As far as I understand, if they're not pumping enough juice through the tube to make it glow, that the tube is most likely not doing much in the signal flow other than completing the circuit. Not a lot of the tasty harmonic distortion that is normally associated with tubes. I had the same experience with the ART Tube MP years ago. Drive it hard enough to start distorting, and there's nothing pleasant about the saturation that you get...it sounds remarkably like transistors clipping.
Great info man
