The 3u 19" Thermionic Culture Earlybird 4 has a unique valve design, in that it uses Class A bias valves in a push-pull circuit, company founder and chief designer Vic Keary believes that this is one of the finest pre-amplifiers available today, and despite they're use for distortion in power amps, valves have better distortion and lower noise than solid state amps. Due to specially designed Sowter transformers the Earlybird 4 boasts well under .01% distortion, a Vic explains that "it's like connecting a pair of wires with gain to your mic, it's so clean!" It has a very high output level of +32dB and if desired, 2nd order harmonics c be introduced by increasing mic gain and reducing output gain. The unit has switched gain controls with a maximum of 62dB of mic gain and a variable output along with pads, phase and stepped filter. A pair of meters can be switched between 1 & 2 and 3 & 4.
