Tube MP Professional Mic Preamp/Processor

pretty decent, warm and fat. sometimes a little muddy. it does add character to your microphone, and i run bass guitar through it, as well as my drum machine.

fairly reliable. it is analog, therefore, you can't "preset" it. knobs and buttons are there to tweek. if you are an old timer, who misses the feel of tape machines, this will give you a few more features. it does what i want and expect it to do, so i consider it reliable.

this is relatively easy to use i suppose. 4 buttons, 2 knobs, phone and  xlr jacks make this unit easy to figure out and straigt forward for the home studio novice. sometimes it does take a few minutes of tweeking to get a clean sound and strong signal, but it can be done with this unit. features are pretty straight forward: pre and post gain, phase inverter, phantom power for condenser mics, +20db gain. the live analog VU meter is worth the 30 bucks paid for this unit alone! much better than led, in my opinion! it is only one channel, so i have 2 of them, to record 2 tracks, stereo. my only REAL complaint, would be there is no power switch! hello?!! you have to unplug it so it is not on 24-7! it also makes a nice pseudo patch bay, so i dont have to reach behind my tascam recorder and plug things into jacks i cannot see!

i dont know, i have never called them, or needed to thus far.

want a fatter sound at a decent price? this unit is for you. i am primarily a guitar player, so i mic my tube amps. i do run bass through this, as well as my drum machine. it fattens up my digital zoom unit, which i like. an on/off switch would be very small upgrade and would make this thing a lot more useful!

I was very happy with the sound while it worked.

I don't -think- it worked once; it DID work once. And the replacement? It worked once as well. I returned the replacement to Musician's Friend where I had purchased the original one for my money back. It's too bad - I liked this inexpensive, but nice sounding and feature packed (for the price) pre, and had planned to purchase a second one as part of a two channel strip. But two losers in a row? I could never trust them after that. ART's support was decent enough, but it's hard for me to take someone seriously as they tell me how their products are very reliable and that they don'thave any known issues with the Tube MP when I got two bad ones in a row. One, ok. Things happen. But two in a row? I used the money that I had paid for this ($129) to purchase two used but clean Samson c-Valves and two Samson C-Comps; with racks and mounts on eBay. OK that was $140 but close enough. Yeah that was a smoking deal. The Samsons may not be as sexy as the ART stuff but it sounds good; it does not have the personality of the ART, but it's clean; and coloring is easy enough to add elsewhere. And of course the Samson gear worked more than once, in fact all four pieces of kit have worked EVERY SINGLE TIME! Hear that, ART??? I am currently in the process of upgrading my entry-level gear to intermediate level; I still have the C-Comps but have replaced them in my chain with a Focusrite Compounder and will eventually replace the C-Valves as well as the Behringer Tube Ultra Q parametric. I have jumped right over all ART gear at this point. ART makes entry to low intermediate-level gear; I have no use for their stuff in my signal chain anymore and wouldn't have it. It cannot be depended on to work when it needs to work. I still have the Levelar compressor that I got for $50 in my guitar chain; it has been reliable so i'll give credit there where it's due. I upgraded the tube in it and it's perfectly acceptable as a guitar pedal. But you won't find any ART in my rack. At the end of the day they are toys dressed up in serious gear's clothes.

Simple enough to use if you know how compressors anmd preamps work. Not totally foolproof for the total novice, it does have a few knobs and buttons, but an easy enough piece of kit for one to learn on at low cost.

No problems per se, but at the end of the day they were ok with having an unhappy customer who was returning his second piece of defective gear in a row for his money back and vowing never to purchase an ART product again. And in my book any company who lets a situation like that end like that; with their final words on the subject being to say how reliable their products are instead of anything else that they could have said is not worth dealing with. The bottom line with ART's customer support is that they will take care of your valid warranty claims efficiently enough but don't expect them to give a **** about you or to admit that there was any fault with their product. They are the type that acts as if your piece of gear was the first one that ever had a problem.

What else can I do but give a low rating? It's lucky to get a 3; the extra two points (over a 1) consist of one for the fact that it sounded good for the short time that it worked and one because customer service replaced it efficiently enough when I made a warranty claim.

I got this for home recording, hoping that this would add warmth to tracks recorded with a mic.  It has phantom power, so one bonus is that this unit will allow you to use a nice condenser mic.  I am currently using a Boss digital recorder with no on-board phantom power.  My hopes for warmth were not met.  I can get a much better sound simply using a dynamic vocal mic direct into my recorder.  The worst part of this unit is the noise.  I had to use two noise gates (one external gate and the one on the Boss recorder) to eliminate the hiss/hum created by this thing.  I got a decent sound, but the mic sensitivity was utterly lost.  It's simply not practical.

It's built well, but after using the unit, who cares if it lasts?

Fairly easy to use - everything is either self-explanatory or well-explained in the manual.  It can be somewhat difficult to get the gain levels set right if you're inexperienced.

No experience with them.

I can't recommend this to anyone.  The tube is a gimmick and nothing more.  There's no warmth to be had - just a lot of annoying background noise.  If you want to sound like an old cassette tape, then this is your unit.  Otherwise, stay away.  If you're looking for tube warmth and crunch to use in front of an amp, you're better off with a Tubeworks, Maxon, or Electro-Harmonix tube-based pedal... or better yet, just buy a tube amp.  I can't say for recording, because this is all I've used.  Trust me, it's jusk for any price.