SEBATRON VMP QUAD PLUS 4-Channel Microphone Preamp
If ever there was a preamp to suit the modern recordist, the Australian-made Sebatron VMP Quad Plus could be it. Let’s face it, these days even the IC-based preamps onboard audio interfaces can sound quite good. Everyone with an audio interface has at least two clean, relatively flexible preamps at their fingertips. What they don’t have is character.
Sebatron’s latest four-channel tube microphone preamp ticks a lot of boxes. It’s affordable, built like a tank, and sonically versatile. It can go from crystal clear class A tube gain to coloured with harmonic distortion.
The preamp runs the tube with a proper High Tension voltage, so the tube isn’t starved for power to achieve artificial breakup. Instead, you get all the clean headroom you can get from a 12AT7. While it’s very low noise, this isn’t the ‘absolute’ cleanest preamp — at the clean end of the scale it can induce 0.05% total harmonic distortion, all the way up to 1% when fully driven — but it’s also no fuzz box. Rather, what you get is
