American-Style Mono Tube Preamp

From beautiful glowing vocals, natural acoustics and punchy drums to overdriven and saturated classic tube warmth, the 86B-1 preamplifier offers a huge sonic palette for engineers and producers to explore.

Rooted in 1950s American-style tube circuitry, the 86B-1 has a huge harmonic footprint and will remedy what you're missing from a lifeless modern signal chain.

The 86B-1 is designed to get any amount of tube coloration into your audio easily. Its two-knob system allows the engineer to fine-tune the type of character needed. You can drive the 86B-1 and control the amount of tonal coloration in your audio. Save time with one preamp that can achieve a variety of sounds.

Rounded out with features like a 20dB pad, 85Hz high pass, two mic input impedances and high impedance front panel DI, the 86B-1 won't sit idle in your valuable rack space!

Introduced in 2014 as a modernized version of the Ampex 601 "suitcase tape recorder," the Locomotive 286A (86B-1 & 86B-2 predecessor) showcased several of the best attributes from the 601. A pentode and dual triode were a crucial part of the sound worth keeping. The 601 could sound so smooth, but also be pushed into full distortion due to its wild amount of gain. This was a great way to get a large amount of use out of one piece of gear. On the contrary, the 601 was never designed to be used with high-output mics, so it lacked input headroom and needed input padding much of the time.

https://www.locomotiveaudio.com/86b-1