Ok, here's the Bass Player review-I can also copy the small TechSpecs section if anyone really wants me to. Forgive the typos.
Review by Bill Leigh
BBE BMAX-T
Pros: Incredibly sweet warmth; excellent tone shaping; a classic design upgraded with thoughtful features
Cons: Power cord attached rather than removable
BBE BMAX
Pros: Warm sound combined with quick resoponse; excellent tone-shaping controls and other features; low price
Cons: Power cord attached rather than removable
Connoisseiurs of stand-alone bass preamps consider the Fender Dual Showman guitar amp the great-granddaddy of them all. In the Grateful Dead's quest to constantly improve their sound, design engineer Ron Wickersham began experimenting with Showman amps in the late '60s, adding a preamp outand using a separate power amp. Wickersham later improved and codified the design in the Alembic F-2B, a single rackmount preamp version that has since become the granddaddy of them all. In the years since, the F-2B's design-from its direct-to-tube input to its interactive EQ-has become the basis for highly regarded bass preamp designs from many manufacturers.
When the folks at BBE Sound started thinking of designing their own version of the single-rackspace tube preamp, they didn't have to look far for inspiration. BBE VP of engineeringPaul Gagon, who worked at Fender until '84, was one of the last engineers to work alongside Fender's noted tube design guru Ed Jahns. With Gagon's expertise, the company came up with the BMAX-T, a bass preamp aimed at combining the warmth that the Fender and Alembic preamps are known for, but with the fast, clean accuracy of modern hi-fi preamps. Once the company felt they had perfected the BMAX-T, they created the BMAX, a lower-priced solid state version with an op-amp driven active DI. In addition to their vintage-inspired front ends, both preamps contain a semi parametric EQ, optical compressor, and BBE's patented Sonic Maximizer circuit.
Kissing Cousins
From the solid chassis and rear-panel jacks to the rugged, abalone-topped knobs, the two preamps look nearly identical, and indeed they share many of the same features. Both are built with sonsiderable attention to quality components and careful details. Like the amps that inspired them, the 3-band EQ on both feature boost-only highs and lows and cut-only mids, and flat EQ dialed in at roughly 2, 10, and 2. The solid-state circuitry, from the semi-parametric through the BBE Sonic Maximizer is identical on both models. Though the semi-parametric mid EQ gain is labeled 0 to 10 like its boost-only, it's actually a +/-12dB boost and cut-a nice tone-tweaking addition to an enduring preamp design. The one-knob compressor, another thoughtful add-on, is an optical design with an internal LED that glows brighter as input level increases. In a small black module the LED is optically coupled to a light-dependent resistor, which controls compression. Turning the knob clockwise both increases compression ratio and lowers the threshold for more compression.
The BMAX Sonic Maximizers aren't some simplified version of the circuit; they're the same as those that appear in the company's stand-alone Sonic Maximizer rack uits, like the BBE 482i. With the circuit engaged, rurning up the PROCESS knob applies more of a phase rotation algorithm that compensates for impeded high frequencies, while the LO CONTOUR offers up a 12dB boost at 50Hz to balance out the process. Confused? Just think of the Sonic Maximizer controls as an extension of your tone-shaping palette, where PROCESS adds a crisp, high-end sheen and LO CONTOUR adds broad, fundamental lows.
Where the two preamps diverge is in their front-end cicuitry, and that makes all the conic difference. While the BMAX-T follows the Fender Showman/Alembic F2B tube based gain staging, the BMAX accomplishes that function with solid-state circuitry. While BBE designed the BMAX input with a relatively high impedance to simulate the warmth that comes from the way tubes load pickups, the BMAX is clearly a different animal, with a brighter, drier sound and faster transients than the warmer BMAX-T. The BMAX and BMAX-T also have differnt DIs, the former incorporating the circuitry and components of BBE's DI-100X transformerless direct box, and the latter incorporatinog a DI 1000 direct box with a Jensen JT DBE transformer. (See August '03 for a review of both DIs and a discussion of the transformers).
