Tone Beast Preamp Review. Great Mic Pre!
I've had this preamp for just under a year, and I really love it.
In this video, I'll demonstrate the depth of this preamp, using a pretty lousy acoustic guitar.
The tonebeast tb12 preamp by Warm Audio really punches above it's weight. I'm not a big fan of introducing unecessary things into my signal chain. That goes for my guitar chain and also for recording. So for example, I don't want to plug through 20 guitar pedals, if I'm only going to be using way. I think it degrades the sound, if that seems I'm crazy. The same thing goes for into my interface. I just want a solid pre, into solid analog to digital conversion. So when I set up this pre, I make sure to use it on an interface where I can bypass the built in pres. I know that they say you can hardly hear the difference, but psychologically I just cant stand the idea of running through multiples pres unecessarily. So long story short, this preamp sounds killer, and it can make a flat sounding, boring source come to life. This tonebeast tb12 mic preamp by warm audio is excellent, especially if you can find it used. It will improve your recordings without instroducing a ton of garbage to your chain. Try it out! Want to hear how the tonebeast compares to other preamps? Well check out this video. I happened to find this cheap tascam board, an m30, for $75 bucks. I compared it head to head against my warm audio tonebeast. At the time I really though the tascam sounded better. Brighter, with less noise, more transparent, just more musical. But over time, I've realized how much more noise the Tascam introduces (white noise, hiss), and also that the tonebeast adds some sort of body, some sort of weight that I really like. Obviously, the best microphone preamp really depends on your source, your need, your project. If I'm doing a tom misch or mac demarco thing, I would prefer ot use the tascam preamps. But for almost everything else, the tone beast is better. It has phantom power, you can easily drive the input, it has line level in, easy modern plugs. The tascam has RCA plugs in the most annoying places. The tonebeast is a great piece of gear. Yes, I would buy it all over again if I could. Nice addition to warm up cold sounding audio (just a little bit).