Colin Fairbairn

Groovetubes may be best known for making replacement vacuum tubes for guitar amplifiers and other audio equipment, but they’ve also impressed a lot of people with their ridiculously big sounding Vipre preamplifier. So, when I saw The Brick and its conservative price, I figured that if it sounded even a little like the Vipre, then it’d be one hell of a deal.

The Brick has a remarkably simple design. Its housed in a “brick” shaped metal case that looks like it’d withstand a drop from a 5th floor window. You power up the internal power supply from the back of the unit, which is where you also access the phantom power. There is a single, large knob for gain right up on the front as well as the mic in and outs and the instrument in and through jacks. There is also a ground lift switch to help solve ground hums. The unit feels super sturdy and all the switches and knobs have a wonderful, overbuilt feel to them. The Brick is designed to be used in the tracking room (or onstage) right next to the sound source so you can run a shorter mic cable. While in theory I like this idea, during a session I had an overly excited bass player step on it, cracking the plastic instrument in jack. Some simple surgery and superglue made it as good as new, but it also prompted me to pull the unit into the control room, where it became a slight annoyance because I couldn’t rack it. A more conventional 1u rack design would have been appreciated here.

Sonically, The Brick gives you what you’d expect from a Class A, tube based preamp. It has a pleasing, very round low end. Mids and highs are smoothed out in an oh so vintage sounding way. The tube can add some very nice fuzzyness or even balls out distortion, a feature that I love to exploit. As a D.I., particularly on electric bass, The Brick is a dream. It competes with stuff that costs 4 times as much. I would classify it as what I like to call a “clumsy” preamp, meaning that it kind of naturally compresses things and doesn’t have the most detailed response, but on many sources, this can be very flattering. Its really nice for mellowing out the often overly hyped sound of Chinese made LDC’s.

There are a few areas where the cost cutting is kind of apparent, though, First off, as a mic pre, the gain only goes from 25 to 55db. This means you’ll have to run an inline pad to get a manageable level on louder sources. Additionally, while driving the pre sounds great, there is no output attenuator to get the signal back down to an acceptable recording level. And while I like the “brick” case of the unit, not being able to rack it may be an annoyance for some. I’m actually considering making a 1u rack case for it an adding a built in pad and a fader for the output. I think then, it’d be giving the UA 610 a serious run for the money.

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