phatt wrote:Someone may have more understanding of these things but to me that is just a fancy name for a tone control and frankly a tone control with only 3 or 4 dB of boost or cut is not something that would bother to build. Heck,,even an average parq Eq would make a bigger impression
I have to agree.
Considering all the "packaging" and "marketing" involved this project is a big dissapointment.
Looking at it, it's really just a simple "waveshaper" coupled to some EQ'ing. Yes, it does recognize two of characteristics, which would be considered important ingredienmts of "tube sound" today. These would be amplitude/intermodulation distortion and non-linear frequency response due to weaker damping factor.
It's just how these issues are addressed that is terribly lacking. Yes, you will get soft distortion from an overdriven JFET but such non-linear "waveshaper" is not really going to capture all the interaction and dynamics of a typical MULTI-STAGE tube amplifier, which cascades several waveshapers.
So for "tube distortion" part this ends up being just an overdriven source follower amp. Okay. Look at just about any GUITAR AMP schematic and you'll find examples of much more ambitious and realistic schemes to fake tube amplifier's amplitude distortions. Compared to stuff employed in Peavey's TransTube amps, Crate amps, AMT pedals, Prithard amps, Quilter amps, etc. this "tube emulation" looks like a joke. If "distorting" is your only criteria for this performance, then I'll guess you'll be happy with it, though.
The other part is that EQ. Yes, tube amps with poor damping will "reflect" the impedance of the load in their frequency response since their gain changes in interaction with loading impedance. This is a recogniseable characteristic but in the end this design simply mimics the non-linear response with a filter, instead of actually doing something that really interacts with your amp/speaker load (as in what 99% of modern guitar amps do). So in the end they simply replicate some EQ curve of their preference (note that very few guitar amps are loaded by tuned cabs so the resulting response is actually different), and I agree you could just as well achieve the very same end results with a graphic EQ. ...And in practice this design is not really different from a graphic EQ design stripped to "fixed" values.
Terribly dissapointing and boring design in all regards.
I mean, how many of us haven't seen a distortion effect coupled to a "cabinet simulator" fixed EQ? I trust most of us have seen much better attempts than this.