Bottlehead Moreplay Preamp Kit, Tube Sound Done Right!

[Music] hey friends my name is steve guttenberg and i am the audiophiliac and i'm here well i'm here to serve you audio uh delights of of all sorts of all kinds but today today it is all about the bottle head more play line stage preamp but it's a kit and well bottle head if you don't know about bottle head they're they're based in seattle washington they've been there since 1994 selling kit electronics they offer a full line but today is just about this one the more play and uh well it's a tube preamplifiers you can plainly see and the tube itself is a little bit unusual it's the 6v6 which i think is actually using some guitar amplifiers a little less common in audio electronics but in any case uh dan schmale the the founder and chief bottle watcher of bottle head he says it's just a really good sounding two but in any case uh they're not hard to find they're affordably priced now just tell you a little bit about well first of all it is a kit i i think i did say that and i didn't build the kit i called upon the assistance of my friend dave king to build it for me he made a short video explaining how that all came together the building and the kit and i'm going to include that in this video today it's a purist design the 6v6 provides all the gain which is actually 9 db of gain which is about average for line preamps um but it does the result of using that single tube is that it has a relatively high output impedance the pre-amplifier does and it is um 3.2 k ohms uh in a practical sense of matching it two power amplifiers well first of all most tube amplifiers it's a no-brainer but i use it only with solid-state amplifiers and it's oh and it is by the way a zero feedback design for you people are obsessed about details like that and i'll put up the minimalist specs being a minimalist that bottle head offers for the more play on the screen i'll put those up right now so one of the things that i like about more play is they do make an effort to use us source parts the transformer the power transformer is a proprietary design it is made in the u.s and so is the wood base it's a really it's a wood base it's not a piece of chipboard with a wood veneer it's a solid wood base and the top plate is aluminum those parts are us sourced so my my uh copy here of the amp though was custom painted by dave king my pal with that beautiful red and black base i think it looks really cool but i'll put up what the standard finish looks like on the screen right now the price by the way is 439 dollars in the u.s but uh bottle head does not have distributors they sell direct worldwide the and by the way you can get the bottle head a fully assembled for an extra fee and i will talk about that a little bit later in the video but now i oh i can't neglect i know you guys are on the edge of your seat no worries there will be an audiophiliac viewer system of the day later in this episode so now i'm going to turn it over to dave and he can tell you about the process of actually building the kit hi i'm dave king steve was nice enough to ask me to build this kit so he could so he could review it so i'm just going to say a few words about the construction the first thing i'd like to talk about is the more play manual the construction manual for the kit this is downloaded from their website from the bottlehead website uh and i just kind of just printed it and put it in a through and binder so be easy to refer to and i think this is the best uh kit instructions i've seen and i've built dozens of kits over the years it's very very complete it really basically just takes you by the hand it gives you good illustrations so you can see where things are um and of course you just check off each step you double check and really make sure you did it right so yeah so that's that's the first thing is this this manual is excellent the second thing i'd like to talk about is just you know this is where i built it these are the tools i use these are standard tools the manual covers what you're going to need you need to read that carefully this kit requires that you meter check the voltages at certain points along the way which is good because there was one point where i wasn't getting a correct voltage check you know the manual tells you where to do that and i had to go back and find that i inverted a diode and correct that but these are just you know your basic tools that you're going to use to build any cut pretty much [Music] although a lot of a lot of kits are kind of more simple than this one in some ways and they don't have the detail and the voltage checks along the way you do absolutely have to have a dc meter this is in my opinion this is probably not the best kit to build if it's your first time building an electronics kit uh it's really important to have good soldering skills obviously and um so if if you're just a newbie you they they can get they can build this for you they have people who will construct these kits if you just if you just want it and and and you're not going to build it yourself so that's a possibility also okay this is the bottom plate here where most of the work is uh you can see it's not terribly complicated uh there's a few places where the wiring is a little tight getting into the middle of the switch for example this is where you know some you know some experience comes in handy that sort of thing um yeah and it's uh but basically it's a lot of fun to build and most people won't have any problems with it again i want to complement a bottle head on the quality of this manual really it really is very thorough here's the layout this is the volume the balance the selector switch which chooses one of these three inputs and these two are outputs in parallel and this is the iec cord socket very simple but it covers the bases so to sum up briefly i had a lot of fun building it um i'm going to give bottle head an a plus on this whole thing the design making it easy to build i'm not going to say too much about the sound that steve's department uh all i'm going to say is i put it in my system and listen to it and i really liked it a lot uh it was punching i would in my opinion above its weight considerably above its weight and um it's just a terrific little kit i really enjoyed it of course not everyone can build the kit or doesn't have the time to build the kit or just the expertise or the confidence to build the kit so the good news is that bottle head will sell you assembled kits but the extra special coolness of all this is that it's assembled by the co-designer of the amp and his name is paul burkland the up charge for the assemble kit is 350 over the kit price the kit price itself is 439 so it's plus 350. so the more play the more play listening sessions started right here with the clips cornwall 4 speakers and the past labs xa25 power app i'm going to put the rest of the system all the other bits and pieces in the description below this video but the but the immediate impression of this little preamp sound was this little guy is powerful it has real to the sound uh well i started with the black keys just you know raw rock and roll drums bass guitar and it was kicking butt pat carney's drums in particular had real power and punch to them very very impressive so the other thing that i noticed right away is uh the gain of this preamp was a bit too much for this system especially considering i had these very high sensitivity speakers so even when i was playing it really loud i think i rarely got over 10 o'clock 10 or 11 o'clock so and at normal listening levels i was all the way down so if that's the case for you there's an easy fix it's a kit you can insert resistors to lower the overall gain of the system so not a problem so yeah i was i was digging it i mean i was playing rock and roll and i was feeling the rock and the role very very clearly next up was paul lay in his solo album now he plays piano it's just solo piano and it's a really really interesting recording it's very the music is is classical but it's jazzy it's one of those hard to define albums which is why it's such a good record and it's a really good recording of solo piano it's not too close it's certainly not distant there's a lot not a lot of reverb on the piano and that immediacy especially his piano touch was very very nicely handled um but his his left hand those the lower registers had real weight to them it was similar to what i was feeling literally with the black keys the highs the high frequencies are a little soft i would say maybe even more than a little soft but the roundness of the sound the 3d presence of the sound is really really impressive at this point i decided to move the more play over to the other's end of the room and play it with the kef ls50 meta system the power amps on that side of the room were the ajir or the first watt f8 i know the ls50 meta sound really really well but it had more more balls more weight more substance to the sound with the more play in the system it was really really interesting so i was playing this this album this rykuta album that he did with ali 4k touring he's how i electric guitar and sometimes so is rye but it's kind of like rye's album a meeting by the river it's about a year later it's 1994 i think that it was recorded and if anything actually i listen to this one more than a meeting by the river it's not as pure and audiophile recording but it just has more drive to it there's a little more life to it i think meeting by the river can be a little sleepy sometimes so anyways playing that record over the ls 50s with the more play in charge and you know again this 3d quality that i was getting a lot of space depth openness a very relaxed sound very easy to listen to it's very it's kind of how you sink into let's put it that way at this point i just decided to put in a solid state preamp for comparison purposes and that turned out to be the juttenheim and the oneheim was definitely not by any subtle amount more solid state sounding it sounded faster it sounded more transparent the base definition tightened up a few notches and i was playing this dj crush album it's very varied but this one track that has just bass drums and flute it's very melodic and yeah the contrast between the moore play and the yotenheim were pretty blatant you know the the was very clear and lively and sparkly detailed very texturey kind of sound and moving back to the moorplay the sound mellowed out and softened by a significant degree but you know it just has this um ability to engage you just take you places and when i return back to the yotenheim it tightened up you know everything kind of like got a little bit more uptight mechanical sounding by comparison you know i can go on and i will a little bit but you know i'll do i'm going to do these so steve what do you really think portion of this review i'm going to tell you i think it's obvious what i think i think the more play has a sound a very tubey rich warm enveloping engaging sound is it neutral is it accurate no i don't think it is any of those things but is it engaging and fun yes absolutely so it's it's not what is the better preamp or that's not what this section of the review is about so steve what did you really think now i'm telling you what i think i'm saying if you want a tube sound this is a great way to go i'm sorry i didn't get to do any tube rolling over the course of this review and if i did when you change the tube the 6v6 you get a different sound so another tube might be more transparent another tube might have better base definition pick your poison in a matter of fact the beautiful thing is uh you can change the tubes as your mood strikes that's one of the best things about living with a tube preamp especially when with just one tube per channel so it's not going to cost you a lot to find out you swap the tube you get a new sound and that's really cool if you want a preamp that has a remote control by the way this one doesn't if that's a deal breaker for you that it has to have a remote no it's not remote the beauty of the workplace is its simplicity it's elegance it's just a pre-amplifying device with three inputs and two out two main outputs so you can use the speakers and also with the subwoofer yeah so i guess what i'm saying here is this is a preamp for people who want a tube preamp that want to relish the sound of a two preamp and all that all that that means that's what you're gonna get with the more play and now it's time for the audiophiliac viewer system of the day hey that's bill and curtis and they are from north vancouver canada and they built that nifty bottle head crack otl output transformers tube headphone amplifier kit they both have imacs in a moddy multi-bit dac by the way the crack is a great match with their high impedance sennheiser hd 600 headphones with some friends there working on building a nelson pass designed amp camp amp kit actually a pair of them for monoblocks to pair with a streamer turntable and preamp oh and speakers they are planning on buying thanks guys hey we are back and my name is steve guttenberg and i am the audiophiliac if you like these sorts of reviews that i've been doing of late please consider subscribing to the channel it's very easy to do hit that button right down there and you can also give me a like the algorithm the youtube algorithm rewards youtubers get lots of likes so if you like what i do yeah give me a like and then what else can i tell you oh you should check out my patreon which can be found at p a t r e o n dot com slash audiophilia and that's kind of it my work here is at last complete thank you again for watching and i really really do hope to see you back here again very very soon bye bye

Channel: Steve Guttenberg Audiophiliac

Views: 23,460

Rating: 4.940701 out of 5

Keywords: audio, audio kits, kit builders, DIY, tube audio

Id: BUYzPzlj8WI

Length: 16min 58sec (1018 seconds)

Published: Thu Aug 26 2021