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Post subject: Lower Gain Preamp Tubes in Hot Rod Deville
Posted: Fri Jan 13, 2012 4:26 pm
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Anyone have any experience doing this? The Unofficial Hot Rod Deluxe Owner's Guide says putting a lower gain tube in V2 adds a more "bluesy" tone, which is something I'm interested in:

Replacing several preamp tubes with their lower gain counterparts will obviously have more of an effect on the volume than only replacing one. Many people describe the lower gain tubes as having more of a "bluesy" sound. Personally, I like the 12AT7 in V3 with 12AX7s in the other two spots. I know many people who don't like how this sounds in their HRD. All of it really depends on the speaker that's in your HRD, and the sound of the instrument being played. The most popular replacement seems to be a lower gain tube in V2, which is part of the Drive channel.


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Post subject: Re: Lower Gain Preamp Tubes in Hot Rod Deville
Posted: Sat Jan 14, 2012 9:42 am
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Several of us have tried the lower gain preamp/PI tubes in similar amps, like the HRDlx, BDlx and BDRI. Definitely can mellow the amp quite a bit, away from the modern/edgy sound. V1 will have the most overall affect on the tone and gain of the amp in both channels. For V2, half is used for both channels as a tone stack recovery, and has some effect on tone just not as much as V1 has. The other half of V2 is used only for the drive channel, so V2 would be a good position to use a lower gain tube for taming the drive channel, with less affect on clean channel. V3 is the phase inverter (PI), for driving the output tubes, and a lower gain tube here will not drive the output tubes as hard. Some insist on a balanced tube for the PI. The more positions that use a lower gain tube, the greater the overall affect. I wouldn't use anything lower than a 12AT7 in any position.

I thought that my HRDvl 4x10 was fine just the way it came, maybe a bias adjustment but stock Sovtek 12AX7WC in all three positions, which is just about as much gain as it gets and I didn't change them. I didn't get the amp to be mellow, because for this one I was thinking more along the lines of; "Anybody wants to get mellow, you can turn around and get the [funk] outta here, alright?!" :lol:

You will get similar results in the Dvl preamp, which is the same layout as the other HRd series amps. Plug and play for preamp tubes, experiment and let us know your results. :)

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