D.W. Fearn VT-1, Руководство по эксплуатации, Страница: 11 / 40

D.W. FEARN
VT-1 & VT-2 Microphone Preamplifers
11
History of the VT-1 and VT-2
Vacuum Tube Microphone Preamplifiers
ONE DAY IN 1991 I was going through some old masters in a closet at home and
came across a reel from 1968. It was one of the first studio recordings I ever made.
I pulled the tape box off the shelf and thought about those days. Although I suspect-
ed that the recording might be a bit crude, I remembered that the music was pretty
good, so I made a cassette to listen to in the car.
I kept forgetting to put the cassette in my pocket for a few days, but finally I remem-
bered to take it. That old recording brought back memories of my first studio — and
how primitive a setup it was. But listening to that tape was a revelation; some of the
sounds were really nice. The vocals were full and warm but still punched through.
Acoustic guitars had a depth I don’t often hear in current recordings. And the sax
solo — wow! It ripped through with a grossly distorted but beautifully powerful sound.
That recording was done on a 4-track Scully 280 and mixed to a 2-track Scully. My
prize microphone was a Neumann U-87 and that’s what was probably on the featured
instrument or voice on each track. Nothing too unusual about that.
I couldn’t afford the Electrodyne board of my dreams back then. In fact, I built the
“mixer” myself. It consisted of half a dozen RCA tube microphone preamplifiers that
I salvaged from the junk pile of the radio station where I worked, an equal number of
old Daven rotary faders, and key switches that “panned” the output to left, center, or
right.
It was the tube preamps that made that recording sound so good. There was no EQ,
no reverb, but maybe just a touch of compression on some sounds, from an old broad-
cast type (tube) limiter.
These preamps were 1940s vintage. They used octal metal tubes with a shielded grid cap, a
cylindrical output transformer the size of a coffee can, and a huge power supply on a sepa-
rate chassis. They were a lot of trouble — the tubes were microphonic and the output was
often noisy. In addition to the hums and hisses, occasionally a take would be ruined by crack-
les and bangs from the tubes. I couldn’t wait to get rid of the things.
And so I did, not long after. I got a beautiful console with IC op amps, linear faders, real pan-
pots, echo sends and returns, and EQ on every input. No more noisy tubes for me.
But now, 25 years later, I got to thinking about the sound of those tubes. Hit them with a bit
of excessive level and the sound became real fat. Hit them with just the right level and they
sounded warm and intimate.
Could that sound be duplicated today? I dug out my old RCA Receiving Tube Manual and
several other old reference books and reviewed the vacuum tube theory I hadn’t thought
about for years. A quick check in the supplier’s catalogs confirmed that tubes were still easy
to obtain.