> Man, I hate to rain on the parade, but I can't really hear a difference between those two guitar samples.
It's subtle. I don't want to lead the witness here, but.. The 407a is darker with better bottom flavour, I attribute this to the iron transformer vs transformerless pre in the Mackie. The harmonics are different, too. The 407a lacks some high end, which I attribute to a mismatch of a 40k tube into a 15k transformer, but CJ's on it, so I'm not worried about that part. The little bit of high end aside, the clarity of the tube circuit is evident. Less feedback, perhaps.
I asked my buisness partner, who is a competent guitar player, to stop by with his acoustic to test the pre. He brought over this battered nylon string affair with a cracked soundboard , so I'm not sure if that artifact is the air wheezing out of the crack or what, but it's there on both, and wasn't on my drum recordings. They were 2 seperate takes, although after recording the 407a, I backed up the multitrack, patched the mackie in, and put him on another track to play along with the first one. No compression used in any of this, although soon I will run the drum room mic thru my Larrchild and crush it. Thats how that mic normally gets used, as an ambiance track mixed in to forgoe reverb. I'll post that too. I guess I could do a Mackie/407A bakeoff with the drum mic soon also.
>I knew that... really. Note to self: no more sarcasm on internet forums.
Dude, I knew you knew. I was just saying for anyone who didn't.
I once thought of using <sarcasm></sarcasm> tags to illustrate my tone of typing, but realized it was nearly all the time.
There, see?
Anyway, total investment here besides junkbox parts was a new 25 dollar chassis and a Shallco gold 3 pole switch. Wait, that was a sample. Ok a chassis. And NYD has been gracious enough to send me a 6BQ7 for testing. So if this can be built with a less exotic tube with a 6.3 v fil, it can be built by the masses. I will post the complete schematic with power supplies pronto.
