Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2018/09/09/simulacra-r-us.html
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Vacuum tubes used to be hidden behind the front panel. Now they have a special display shelf.
Don’t think a preamp with >80% total harmonic distortion would sound very good, either.
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Seems like an appropriate place to post this:
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It goes to 18.5.
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“2 492,00 €(VAT EXCLUDED)” dependent upon selection of tubes.
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Boy, do I ever want this. I would be perfect in our music room. I suspect I could manufacture it cheaper than buy it. And it would be very expensive to manufacture.
When talking about audio quality, “warmth” is my ■■■■■.
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Don’t forget to order your oxygen-free speaker cables and those little pyramid stands with it. /s
If you’re into authentic reproduction of recorded material you don’t want to “shape the sound” - that’s the fricken mastering engineer’s job. You want to clearly and linearily replay it. That’s what solid state amplification is perfectly good for.
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With most people buying music that was tracked, mixed, and mastered digitally (even if its purchased on vinyl) the obsession with analog is pretty rediculous. Less so if the material being played is old enough to have a full analog production signal chain.
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It’s pretty and retro and has tubes, but so does tons of other pro-audio studio gear. The title of this post seems to indicate that this is meant for an average joe to hook up to his home stereo system. that’s not what it’s for.
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Fer sure - this is NOT meant for an end user to play Pandora through, it’s meant to deliberately color sound during the recording process -
“The Kerwax Replica creates a wide variety of tube harmonic distortion characteristics, from gentle enhancement to smashing blast, with an easy tweaking combination of gain drive and output volume stages, bias adjustment and EQ knobs. It is the ideal companion as an insert or a front-end unit for processing and warming up your stems or mix.”
And don’t get me started on the 'vinyl/tubes are better sound quality or “warmer” nonsense. There are legit reasons to purchase things on vinyl, but audio fidelity is not one of them.
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I think this thing is intended to be used by the mastering (or recording?) engineer.
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That awkward moment when Cory Doctorow posts about a piece of technology and it’s clear that he has no idea what it is or what it does.
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Or maybe 18½
This is a guitar fuzz pedal c.1948.
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I like the way it looks like a face with tubes for teeth.
And I award several bonus points for the retro grey - I must try to use that myself. So much better than beige.
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I can not pass by an article about french made electronic music equpiment without mentioning Mutable Instrument’s “Shruthi-1”. A monophone, digital synthesizer with MIDI input and a range of analogue filters with which I had quite a bit of fun (to the extent possible for a rather tone deaf person like me). Sadly, they do not sell the kit anymore. But they made it open source, including the PCB layouts.
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Fun linguistic aside: since it’s from Brittany, the “Ker-” in the company’s name is likely the Brittanic prefix meaning “fortified/enclosed/place”.
… That is all. Goodnight!
