Whether or not you consider yourself an “audiophile,” you’ve certainly heard that vacuum tubes produce a warm sound that is difficult, if not impossible, to duplicate with more modern equipment. While this may have been true at one time, Korg’s Nutube device attempts to fuse the benefits of new and old, with newly developed tube technology that acts like a tube sound-wise, but requires less than 2% of the power required to operate a normal tube.
As shown in the video below, Tindarian Microwavemont has developed a headphone amplfier based on this technology. While it’s difficult to really understand how something like this sounds without trying it yourself, reviews are quite positive. In addition to the audio benefits, you can see another interesting feature in the video below, the tube glows when producing music.
This glowing feature is due to it being based on vacuum fluorescent display (VFD) technology, meaning this is an integral part of the device. While this may not matter to some, having visual feedback to go along with the music is a pleasant experience found in vintage tube amps.
This feature was especially important to reviewer “Louis,” who loved the audio of his amp, but didn’t quite like the tone of the light. Noting that the back side of the Nutube units are partially clear, he added an LED backlight in order to make it look more warm. Results look good shown below, though as with most photographs of LEDs, I’d guess it looks even better in real life.
It’s a neat mod, and if you come up with something using, involving, or even related to Tindie stuff, please let us know @Tindie on Twitter. You can also ping me directly @JeremySCook.
