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Vintage threads from the first ten years

tube king

1/13/1998 6:25 AM
M/J	tube king I wanted to post this in the already established thread on the tube king but the page wont let me so here we go. I finally received my tube king and after about 1/2 hour of fiddling around I decided to take it apart and see what kind of tube was in it. Upon inspection I decided that it looked like one of those cheesy 12ax7's from china. I then started running the gammit of the NOS american tubes I have. I tried the ax, 5751, at, av, ay, az, and au. The ax sent that pedal into hyper drive. If your into metal only put an american ax in there and youre good to go. It wasn't until I got to the au that the boost levels came down enough to be usable for my style of music. Even with a gain of 22 the au outperformed the china tube with a gain of 100. The tones were rich instead of transparent, like they were, and the the gain was 5 times what it was. With the gain up on 10 you could play metal (but use the ax if you really want endless sustain) and with the gain on 0 but the master on 6 you get that nice overdrive sound of a ts9. I then hit the bypass switch to check for coloration (none). Then I plugged my guitar direct to the amp. This pedal doesn't seem to color the sound at all (nice). The pedal is also real quiet. I listened to a lot of pros and cons on this page about this pedal but I have to say this is an excellent pedal as long as you get rid of that cheesy tube. Some of the complaints I read were IMHO directly attributed to the tube. Anybody else tried this and have an opinion? Thoughts? By the way I sold my ts9. It was a reissue if you're wondering. M/J

1/13/1998 6:25 AM

M/J

tube king

I wanted to post this in the already established thread on the tube king but the page wont let me so here we go. I finally received my tube king and after about 1/2 hour of fiddling around I decided to take it apart and see what kind of tube was in it. Upon inspection I decided that it looked like one of those cheesy 12ax7's from china. I then started running the gammit of the NOS american tubes I have. I tried the ax, 5751, at, av, ay, az, and au. The ax sent that pedal into hyper drive. If your into metal only put an american ax in there and youre good to go. It wasn't until I got to the au that the boost levels came down enough to be usable for my style of music. Even with a gain of 22 the au outperformed the china tube with a gain of 100. The tones were rich instead of transparent, like they were, and the the gain was 5 times what it was. With the gain up on 10 you could play metal (but use the ax if you really want endless sustain) and with the gain on 0 but the master on 6 you get that nice overdrive sound of a ts9. I then hit the bypass switch to check for coloration (none). Then I plugged my guitar direct to the amp. This pedal doesn't seem to color the sound at all (nice). The pedal is also real quiet. I listened to a lot of pros and cons on this page about this pedal but I have to say this is an excellent pedal as long as you get rid of that cheesy tube. Some of the complaints I read were IMHO directly attributed to the tube. Anybody else tried this and have an opinion? Thoughts? By the way I sold my ts9. It was a reissue if you're wondering.

M/J

Replies:

Doc M/J:Thanks for the experime... -- 1/13/1998 1:11 PM
Daniel R. Haney FYI, The Ibanez Tube King is made b... -- 1/18/1998 1:19 PM
Doc M/J:I finally got around to... -- 1/23/1998 10:07 AM
Keith Does the Tube King have a true bypa... -- 2/12/1998 6:43 AM