Echolette NG-51 Pre-Amp. The old German Klemt Echolette tape echo machine has always remained mostly overshadowed by other more famous tape echos of the era, but those who know these golden boxes love them for their unique sound, especially when it comes to their massive sounding preamp. If you’ve ever heard the tube driven Echolette preamp, you’ll know that it can achieve everything from an impressive glassy volume boost (with a TON of volume on hand) to an absolutely monstrous chewy fuzz-like overdrive that leaves the hairs on the back of your neck standing on end. As well, these preamps are much celebrated for their very unique tone control that interacts with the gain structure of the preamp as well as hitting an amplifier in a brilliant way. This tone control is peculiar in that it works by cutting bass below 12 o’clock or cutting treble above 12 o’clock with a “flat” frequency response at noon on the pot. My initial goal in recreating this sound in a reliable form (much like my efforts with the PreAmp 150) was to create a stand alone, tube driven preamp unit (even implementing that famous ‘magic eye’ tube VU meter), but when time constraints and cost started to become an issue, I went back to the drawing board and opted to use solid state concepts instead to achieve similar operating characteristics to the ECC83 tube. In this emulation of the original tube driven units, I have spent an obsessive amount of time testing JFET transistors, aiming to get them to operate and respond harmonically in the same way that my old Telefunken ECC83 driven machine operates. Here, I really think I have managed to encapsulate that sound by selecting JFETs that operate only in a very specific range and by feeding them a much higher internal voltage than a standard 9 volt power supply can give. This offers the quite frankly absurd volume boost and headroom that a tube running at a high plate voltage gives (though that voltage is also switchable via a toggle on the top of the pedal should you decide to want the lower headroom 9v internal voltage…another flexibility in the sound!). All this is to say that this preamp sounds absolutely wonderful and I am proud to add it to the Mile End Effects family for as long as I can source these transistors (which in the not so distant future will actually become quite an issue and threaten my ability to actually make these).
