KORG NuTube Evaluation - First Impressions and Microphonics Test

hey how's it going everybody Brad the Atalla gist here and this is the moment many of you have been waiting for this is a FedEx package obviously but this comes from my good friend Hiroyuki hiruta of Korg and has come all the way from Japan and it's time to open it up finally and take a look at it I know I've been teasing you guys with this package for a little while opening other packages of customer things and I'm finally getting down to this actually I don't need this FedEx package or maybe I do poor design who do I complain to okay so I put up a video not long ago about the Korg new tubes and I'll put a link up here in the corner somewhere if you guys want to go check that out I'll put a card there but just kind of going on their website and looking at you know what it was how it worked looking at some of this specs for the things and just getting a sense of what to expect if we were to try to design an amplifier with one or a you know preamp or a guitar pedal or something of the like and a lot of you were very very curious to see what I could do with one and a couple of you even wrote to Korg and that probably is what pushed him over the edge to send me some stuff I wrote to them also after making that video so we'll see what they sent here first first there's two there two different packages and the first one contains not one but four Korg new tubes so we've got four the suckers they're actually a little bit smaller I guess than I expected I mean I expected them to be small but once you get them it's kind of you know you all when all you've seen are pictures on the internet I mean there you go four of them fit in my hand pretty easily so you gives you a sense of the size and it's it's surprising anime that they sent me four of these things and we may bust this out into a couple of different videos I do still have some customer things I need to get around to and designing something I'm going to try to design something pretty much from scratch I mean I'm gonna go off of some of the you know some of the design schematics they already have probably when I do my design my first design that is looks like I might have up to four chances to get it right here got a little bit of a bit pin issue right there and just examining this well what I was gonna say actually first is you know I'm gonna try to develop my own thing I'm not interested in doing clones or building something someone else is already designed or anything like that I would just like to see how difficult it is for somebody like me who is used to messing with tube technology in general really more so than any solid-state stuff how a difficult it's gonna be to design a circuit around one two three or maybe even four of these things like I said they have some schematics already on their website but it looks like they're they're kind of marketing and these a little bit more for like headphone amplifiers you know a stereo preamps or that sort of thing maybe more so than guitar stuff so what I'm gonna do is see if I can design something kind of from the ground up I'll I'll sort of take their schematic as a baseline and give me some direction for you know things like which what level of voltage is to start out trying and things like that what components we're gonna need I mean I know how the technology works but at the same time if they've already figured out its you know some of the some of the operating slopes and things like that that's going to prevent me from having to sit down and do a bunch of math to get a place to start and then I can kind of go through and start modifying things to taste so yeah it's gonna be a bit like you know cooking to a recipe but then taking some things out and putting some other things in and you know grabbing a bit of oregano off the shelf and sprinkle in a bunch of it and then some powdered sugar and then whatever else I feel like footing in there so so four of these things Wow thank you thank you thank you guys I appreciate it cork and I especially appreciate it hiroyuki hiruta thank you so much we have a second package here to open I think I know what it is and this is going to be helpful and probably really cool to look at as well this is this is a board specifically designed to help one evaluate this technology this is a this is a new tube evaluation board so what we're going to be able to do here is plug one of these new tubes into the socket and it will already have all of everything we need here it's got it will allow us to adjust a few things some parameters it looks like we've got a headphone out volume here but here's a second board as well I mean I'm talking figure it out I'm sure what's going on here but we have left and right input see the again there does their marketing these more for the hi-fi set then you know necessarily the guitar players but we have stereo in and stereo out we also have a DC 12 volt supply socket here we also have a headphone socket here is that a jumper or no no it's a little amplifier some kind our integrated circuit at least and I'm guessing this might be a speaker speaker outs here yeah that's definitely an output interesting okay so the second little board this goes on there obviously goes in the sockets and I guess this provides a way to interface between this board and and the tube itself so what you've got to do is take your new tube and solder it to one of these guys and this board I think they do this to try to help isolate possibly because I did read that these can get kind of microphonic that's a possible reason they've done this the other reason could be because perhaps these pins are a bit bit on the fragile side but the idea here is going to be we're just going to tack this tack solder this well this on here on this board and then we'll be able to plug it in to this board and evaluate it if we want to do that I don't know if I'm going to break break this out into multiple videos I think I may and and kind of stretch it out for a bit because I've got other things too and I really can't make a big long Korg video at the moment and the reason is you know it's gonna take some design it's going to take some some thought me sitting down and actually doing some reading we're just in the kind of evaluation stage here I wanted to show you guys what I got so stay tuned for more on this in the future and it would probably be the very near future what we can at least do in this video is plug this thing in I'll get I'll get a signal input and we'll just see how it works okay soldering iron is warm and ready to go I've got the new tube on the board it's mounted upside down I'm actually gonna I'm going to solder it from the bottom here it probably probably be a little easier to get off later if I want to get it off of here then again I'm not sure if there's ever going to be a reason for me to get it off of there or not but I would still like to have the option okay so there we are our first new tube soldered onto our first new tube board okay now let's install this board into the larger evaluation board and get a signal into it and get some power into it okay for this we're just going to use a wall wart power supply and it looks like we've got glow on the tube you get some lights here I believe we do can only be a little bit hard to tell but we definitely have glow on this tube and I have to say it looks lovely looks really cool kind of like you've just jumped into KITT from Knight Rider or something I expect it to ask me where I want to go at any second here but yeah very cool looking thing I guess let's play around with it like so we've got a couple of adjustable potentiometers here one down here and one down here I'm guessing those are four maybe that's for each channel volume or maybe tone I don't know honestly no idea like I said we have another integrated circuit a little further downstream here we've got another integrated circuit here so I don't know what any of these things are doing but let's see I'm gonna need a left and a right channel an input of some kind here all right you guys might remember my T AK 220 tape machine that we we serviced not too long ago it's collected a little dust since then but should still work I don't think my Michael Bolton tape was as fortunate so we're gonna have to find something else to play first let's get this thing plugged in that was interesting no the the little phosphorescent light just blinked at me when I plugged this one did the same thing perhaps because it's drawing drawing down some current this is kind of awkward to put to try to plug in because I know these these won't take you very much for so I think I'm gonna leave it at that okay internal volume way down and once again I can only guess that that's what that is and I have no clue what these are there's definitely one per channel whatever it is it's either tone or volume I'm guessing let's come out the headphone jack here and go directly into the camera and we'll see what kind of sounds we can get and for those of you who aren't put off by the use in the 1970s t act 220 which was considered kind of a low-end tape player for this demonstration and you're a little bit of a you're a little bit of a cable hound I'm using monster cables to come out of the Teac and into this unit and I'm going to use a Belkin cable with gold-plated tips to come out of this and into the camera so decent cables all around so you know if there are any issues I would suspect it's either from this unit or from this unit and to the guy who doesn't like me laughing at my own jokes sorry man sorry I'm probably gonna continue laughing at my jokes because because I'm [Music] down [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] okay so what have we learned from this I would say I have some serious reservations about the amount of micro phonics that this thing displays if you were going to try to build an entire amp out of these with all stages I just don't know if you were to put more than one of these things in an amplifier for instance and try to play through a combo amp with the speaker you know blubberin beneath this thing I mean it's I can just barely touch it and dean you you know you could hear that clearly it didn't seem to be as bad while an input signal was going on however if you were if he didn't have any kind of input signal going into the thing I don't know you know I just don't know how that would react in a guitar amp as particularly if you had more than one of these you know cuz at every stage you would have the same thing happening and it would just build upon itself I'd I would really have to play with this thing some more to really know but I would say I mean so far I'm up in the air about it and I have serious reservations about the amount of the amount of you know basically micro phonics my other reservation is about this board and about the amount of noise you could tell whenever I stopped the music program the noise came out now that's not all some of that might be the compression on my camera some of it but I had I have the input signal doubt all the way down so the compression shouldn't have been kicking in for most of that on the camera so you can kind of rule that out in some passages there might have been some camera compression but in most of those passages you weren't going to hear and what she were basically hearing is whatever was onboard here on this this unit and this was built by the manufacturer of the the technology so you know if they can't get it right then probably nobody's gonna and the fact that we're we're getting that much noise out of this board I have reservations about that as well but you know I really won't know until I try to build my own thing and it's gonna be for guitar so you know again we just won't know until we put you try to use it in our intended application which is guitar but so far I have to say I'm not really impressed I would take traditional tube technology over this technology in this application for you know headphone preamp or you know just a preamp in general for hi-fi that said let's uh I'm gonna say goodbye and for now and we will be back with more of these in the future and in our next episode we will try to build something specifically and exclusively for the guitar so thanks you guys for watching and for now you all take care

Channel: The Guitologist

Views: 69,184

Rating: 4.7296419 out of 5

Keywords: korg, nutube, vacuum, fluorescent, display, tube, tubes, valve, valves, Ibanez, Tube screamer, pedal, circuit, evaluation, microphonic, microphonics, demo, demonstration, test, 6P1

Id: raYGrKWSKRE

Length: 18min 13sec (1093 seconds)

Published: Tue Feb 20 2018