| Funny thing, I wouldn't use it as a regular mic pre, yet I quite enjoy it for bass. I've used mine as a front end to warm up cold-sounding amps, as a level matcher, to buffer passive basses against the low (10K) input impedance of my Radial JDI, as a 1/4" to XLR adapter, as an active DI...
It's a great low-cost gadget to have in your gig bag.
There are a lot of negatives that can be said about it (low-voltage power supply, too cheap to be any good, doesn't do tube overdrive, tube is hard to replace when it dies, etc.), but I don't really care about what's under the hood. Even if the tube is just window dressing, it's a cool sounding little box, for very little cash.
As far as tube replacement goes, I've been using mine on and off for about 5 years, and it's still working fine on the original tube. Even if I broke it trying to replace the tube and had to buy a new one, it doesn't owe me anything, especially now that the Studio is down to about thirty bucks!
One caveat: I prefer the regular Tube MP, simply because the VU meter on the "Studio" goes nuts if you DI into a channel that has phantom power on it. Diming the needle with 48V doesn't seem to affect the tone, but it can't be doing anything good for the meter!
Last edited by steve_rolfeca : 06-21-2011 at 01:55 PM.
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