My favourite preamp ever is a Warwick Hellborg one - they made it for a short time and a silly price ... then blew them out cheap at Thomann and I hesitated and missed out... the thing is the magic was in the first preamp stage - I could turn the DI off and it would still sound great...
From what I can see... there's a buffer taking instrument input into mic level, a transformer, then the THAT1512 as a the main IC - interestingly the 1512 doesn't need a input transformer so it seems to have been done due to the sound rather than a need... And plugged into an amp it wasn't using the DI output transformer at all!
When I asked Warwick were like "this is legacy we don't have info", and Haufe were like "we can make and sell you 100+ of the transformer but can't tell you anything about it"
What do we think? In my mind the thing I liked was the transformer's tone - but it's probably lost in the midst of time what the transformer is.
Schematics attached!
From what I can see... there's a buffer taking instrument input into mic level, a transformer, then the THAT1512 as a the main IC - interestingly the 1512 doesn't need a input transformer so it seems to have been done due to the sound rather than a need... And plugged into an amp it wasn't using the DI output transformer at all!
When I asked Warwick were like "this is legacy we don't have info", and Haufe were like "we can make and sell you 100+ of the transformer but can't tell you anything about it"
What do we think? In my mind the thing I liked was the transformer's tone - but it's probably lost in the midst of time what the transformer is.
Schematics attached!
