The Warm Audio TB12 Tone Beast has always been one of our favorite "secret weapons" in the shop. It is a complete Swiss Army knife of a preamp that gives you an incredible range of classic, punchy API-style tones at a price point that makes it easy to add high-end analog mojo to any rack.This Retro Limited Edition takes everything we love about the original TB12's flexible, discrete circuitry and wraps it in a gorgeous, vintage-inspired aesthetic. Featuring a premium powder-coat faceplate, massive vintage-style knobs, and satisfying metal toggle switches instead of the standard push-buttons, this version looks and feels like it was pulled straight out of a classic 1970s console. Under the hood, Warm Audio actually expanded the physical circuit board just to accommodate these larger, high-quality components, keeping the exact same premium signal path intact.

Why We Love It

• Unrivaled Tone Shaping: You aren't just getting one sound here. With the flip of a few switches, you can swap between a vintage, mid-forward Melcor 1731-style op-amp and a cleaner, more linear Jensen 918-style op-amp. From there, you can route your signal through a warm, saturated 100% Steel CineMag transformer, a cleaner 50% Nickel transformer, or bypass the transformers entirely for ultra-clean tracking. You can even swap out the capacitors (Tantalum vs. Electrolytic) to fine-tune the character.
• The Power of Saturation: One of our favorite ways to use the Tone Beast is as a saturation box. Because it features a dedicated output attenuation control, you can drive the input gain hard to get those rich, analog harmonics on vocals, electric guitars, and bass without clipping your audio interface or converters.
• A True Studio Front-End: With a front-panel true Hi-Z instrument input, an 80Hz high-pass filter, a -20dB pad, and an insert loop to patch in your favorite compressor or EQ before the output transformer, it serves as the perfect channel strip starting point.  The Bottom LineIf you want a single-channel preamp that can go from clean and transparent to warm, gritty, and aggressively driven—all while looking stunning in your studio rack—this Retro Limited Edition of the Tone Beast is a no-brainer. It’s a gorgeous nod to the golden era of recording that delivers elite, professional-grade analog tone.

Unleash The Beast!

The TB12 Tone Beast Black is a fully professional preamp design with loads of gain that can effortlessly capture an array of sources very well. It is a swiss army knife full of options and tones. With top notch CineMag transformers and multiple discrete signal paths, it's hard to beat the Tone Beast's big, bold, fully-professional sound at this price.

The Tone Beast Black is a mic pre that likes to be pushed and when pushed will colorize your signal ever so sweetly. The 2 opamps and 2 output transformers at the flip of their switches won't appear to be much different, but as one drives the pre into harmonic distortion, the unique character of each of these components becomes apparent. The Tone Beast Black is customizable and allows users to source and swap in their own opamps.

The output control on the TB12 allows you to limit the signal exiting the preamp even when pushing the gain to really hot levels, giving you maximum control.

When designing the TB12 Tone Beast Black our goal was to make a microphone preamplifier affordable and jam packed full of options, without compromising the quality and design parameters that make this type of microphone preamplifier so desirable.

Warranty

This item is sold without the Sound Pure 3-year warranty (used / B-stock / dealer-exempt). Coverage terms for items in this category live in Terms & Conditions, Section 27.

Returns

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