Music Thing: Fake tubes are everywhere
Each week Tom Whitwell of Music Thing highlights the best of the new music gear that's coming out, as well as noteworthy vintage equipment:
Every music geek I know has either been cooing over a Minneapolis school band playing DJ Shadow's 'Endtroducing', or complaining about fake tubes.
Plenty of small companies do very clever things with tubes, most notably Metasonix and Zachary Vex. But for a while, promising 'tube warmth' has been a favourite gimmick of gear manufacturers. They take a regular piece of digital-modelling kit, chop a window in the top and insert a Chinese or Russian made 12AX7 pre-amp tube. One of the nice things about real tube amps is that they glow gently. Inside each tube is a little heater, powered by at least 100 volts from the mains. That's pretty difficult to achieve in a box running off a 12v mains adapter, so a few manufacturers (notably Korg and Behringer) place orange LEDs behind their tubes, to give them that nice glow. It's debatable what effect underpowered tubes can possibly have on the sound, but they sure look pretty.
Somewhere along the line, word of the popularity of tubes in high-end audio gear has leaked out to people making the kind of radios they sell in Woolworths. They're now producing $10 radios with glass tubes, metal grilles, glowing LEDs and black, ridged, boxes that must be supposed to suggest transformers.
But wait! There's more! For $499 you can buy a piece of software ('TL Aggro', by Trillium Lane Labs), which comes complete with a little picture of a tube, somehow glowing away behind your LCD. There's no word yet on whether the software runs on the full 100 volts, or just 12.
[Sorry for the delay in our regular Music Thing column—continue to look for it at its regularly scheduled Friday afternoon slot! —Ed.]
