Thermionic Culture

The 3u 19" Earlybird 4 has a unique valve design, in that it uses Class A bias valves in a push-pull circuit.Company founder and chief designer Vic Keary believes that this is one of the finest pre-amplifiers available today, and despite their use for distortion in poweramps, valves have better distortion and lower noise than solid state amps. Due to specially designed Sowter transformers the Earlybird 4 boasts well under .01% distortion, as Vic explains "it's like connecting a pair of wires with gain to your mic, it's so clean!"It has a very high output level of +32dB and if desired, 2nd order harmonics can be introduced by increasing mic gain and reducing output gain.The unit has switched gain controls with a maximum of 62dB of mic gain and a variable output along with pads, phase and stepped filter. A pair of meters can be switched between 1 & 2 and 3 & 4.

The Rooster is a valve based design mic/line & DI pre-amp with EQ and a distortion section based around the same 5725 valve used in the ever-popular Culture Vulture.INPUT STAGEThe input stage uses a custom 1200-ohm input Sowter transformer and an ECC81/12AT7 valve.EQ SECTIONThe neatly laid out EQ section has all the Boost or Lift controls on the left, with a broad bass lift control, peaking at 60Hz, and a selectable mid/high lift at 2.5k, 4k ("bell" shaped) and 7k (shelving) respectively. All the Cut controls are on the left hand side, the mid cut is 700Hz, the 6 position bass cut is straight off the Earlybird 2 pre-amp. There is also a switchable LPF ( low pass filter ).'ATTITUDE' DISTORTION SECTIONThe same 5725-distortion tube which is employed in the Culture Vulture is used in the new Rooster. It offers a subtle distortion characteristic in the triode position, more so than a Culture Vulture due to the higher HT voltage, and so has a very low (about 0.01%) distortion when the 'Attitude' control is set to 1. In the pentode mode it generates more 3rd harmonic distortion. Distortion can be pretty radical when the Attitude control is to 'Max' and the input is high.OUTPUT SECTIONThe output valve is ECF80 which combines high output with low impedance (less than 100 ohms). There is +48v phantom power, and phase reverse. The output is unbalanced as standard but a balancing transformer option that is used in the Culture Vulture Mastering will be available.