mars_hall Posted June 29, 2014 Posted June 29, 2014 Finally got one of these this week. I had been on the prowl for one for years after hearing one and had a pretty good idea what to expect. At first when I plugged it in, I was super disappointed, anemic denial. What had I done? Then I discovered that the single input control was more than just a unity gain buffer and actually controlled the overall gain of the entire preamp , this not necessarily left to the gain controls of the individual channels. Hallelujah! The original circuits were copied from Dumble and Mesa by a couple of guys in Germany that manufactured the line under the Kitty Hawk namebrand. The original preamp design, the Kitty Hawk Quattro, used a overtaxed power supply circuit and was prone to overheating failure. When Kitty Hawk eventually folded, one of the two guys went to Jersey, redesign the power supply circuit with a torrid transformer and gave the preamp more room to breathe by dropping it in a 2U rack version instead of the previous 1U. The was the QTR-1 by Soho Acoustics. The other guy in Germany started suing the one in Jersey over content of the design, so Soho eventually folded to economic pressure and continued legal costs. Reb Beach used one of these designs for the first Winger album, so if you remember "Seventeen", you have a feel for what he could do with one. I plugged mine into my "amp in" circuit on the Carvin Legacy 3 via a 4x12 cabinet and I can say I truly got my money's worth. Night and day from the first reaction. It actually sounds more defined than the Legacy's front end using the settings I have been using and the same guitar. Lend an ear...
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