An American-Style Mono Tube Preamp Designed for Versatility
From beautiful glowing vocals, natural acoustics and punchy drums to overdriven and saturated classic tube warmth, the 86B-1 preamplifier offers a huge sonic palette for engineers and producers to explore.
Rooted in 1950s American-style tube circuitry, the 86B-1 has a huge harmonic footprint and will remedy what you're missing from a lifeless modern signal chain.
TRANSFORMERS
Super Premium MuMetal shielded inputs and nickel & steel outputs set the stage
TUBES
An 6BR7 input tube and 12AY7 output tube amplify the signal with 75 dB of max gain
OUTPUT LEVEL LED
A 3-color LED indicator shows signal level.
Green -> Yellow -> Red
Click HERE to see level-specific LED color
Tubes, Transformers and an Amplifier Design You Will Love
The 86B-1 is designed to get any amount of tube coloration into your audio easily. Its two-knob system allows the engineer to fine-tune the type of character needed. You can drive the 86B-1 and control the amount of tonal coloration in your audio. Save time with one preamp that can achieve a variety of sounds.
Rounded out with features like a 20dB pad, 85Hz high pass, two mic input impedances and high impedance front panel DI, the 86B-1 won't sit idle in your valuable rack space!
86B Lineage
Introduced in 2014 as a modernized version of the Ampex 601 "suitcase tape recorder," the Locomotive 286A (86B-1 & 86B-2 predecessor) showcased several of the best attributes from the 601. A pentode and dual triode were a crucial part of the sound worth keeping. The 601 could sound so smooth, but also be pushed into full distortion due to its wild amount of gain. This was a great way to get a large amount of use out of one piece of gear. On the contrary, the 601 was never designed to be used with high-output mics, so it lacked input headroom and needed input padding much of the time.
Taking this into account, we designed the Locomotive 286A by using the Ampex 601 circuit and modified it for modern use. We also added all the important mic preamp features like phantom power, pad, polarity, low cut and DI.
The following sound samples show the difference between 3 different Locomotive preamps when sent the same prerecorded line-level audio.
Each preamp has been set to accept a line-level input. The WT-72 was set on LINE and at 36 dB gain. The 86B was set on LINE, and knobs were set for low gain and level matched to the WT-72. The 40AM was set at (HIGH) LINE unless otherwise noted on sound file.
Unlock Your Creativity
Finding the right piece of gear to give your sound that "special something" might be one of the hardest parts of engineering. In our opinion, having an exciting combination of tools at your fingertips is the best way to get your creative juices flowing. The 86B-2 will help to unlock your audio engineering mind and allow you to focus on creating truly impressive audio.
LIFETIME WARRANTY
As an audio engineer, we know you want to use the best tools to shape your sound. And if you are going to spend money on gear, you deserve hardware that's always in tip-top shape. You shouldn't have to worry about when something goes wrong. Rest assured, we guarantee the gear we build by backing it with a lifetime warranty.
