By the EM Staff
Electronic Musician, Jan 1, 2003
Direct-Injection Box, Tube
Valvotronics: Tube Amplified Direct Box ($400)
The Valvotronics Tube Amplified Direct Box is one of those rare devices EM editors love to discover: lovingly hand built, one at a time, in a garage somewhere, by a lone designer with a passion for superior audio, a pining for a particular (and unavailable) sound, and the know-how and industry to make that sound a reality. An all-tube unit with a custom-wound transformer output, the Valvotronics is a beast of a box with a hot output and attitude to spare, both visually and sonically.
Unusual features include a Bass Tilt switch that engages a 6 dB-per-octave lowpass filter with a corner frequency at 500 Hz, great for producing pillowy electric-bass tracks devoid of high frequencies (think reggae); a continuously variable, defeatable passive filter that provides up to 20 dB of bell-curve cut (centered at 7.5 kHz) with a bandwidth of roughly 1.25 octaves (great for diminishing pick noise); and a continuously variable attenuator knob that provides up to 6 dB of level cut. The unit provides three unbalanced -inch TS jacks: a high-impedance instrument input, an unbuffered Thru jack wired in parallel with the input jack to provide a mult you can route to your guitar amp, and a buffered jack for connection to a tuner. The output is on a balanced, low-impedance XLR jack, and there's a Pin 1 Lift switch in case you need to break the signal ground.
"Phenomenal" is the word our reviewer used to describe the sound of the Valvotronics DI; he proclaimed it "easily the biggest-sounding DI I've heard on electric-bass guitar, dishing out insane amounts of rich tube saturation and corpulent bass frequencies." Though bass seems to be the unit's primary raison d'être, we also got wonderful results running electronic keyboards through the Valvotronics, and electric guitars fared nicely, too. If you're looking for a versatile and beefy tube DI with a sound and look all its own, we suspect you'll be just as knocked out by the Valvotronics Tube Amplified Direct Box as we were.