[OWEN O'MALLEY PLAYING BASS THROUGH BBE BMAX-T TUBE BASS PREAMP]

OWEN O'MALLEY: Welcome back to Gearwire.Com. I'm Owen O'Malley, and this smooth little customer right here is the BMAX-T from BBE. It is a tube bass preamp suitable for studio and live use. It is from BBE and so of course it includes a Sonic Maximizer because the Sonic Maximizer is to BBE as the DB is to Roland.

This guy has a three-band EQ. Right on the front here, there's a preamp gain control. The preamp gain is controlled by a 12AX7 preamp tube. There is also a sweepable parametric mid control, there is a compressor built in that's foot switchable, and over on the end here we've got our BBE Sonic Maximizer also footswitchable on and off. In the back, there is an effects loop. There's a 1/4" out and there is also an XLR balanced direct out with a ground lift.

This preamp has a very sparkly sort of hi-fi without being harsh, natural tone. It doesn't have that many radical different tones. It doesn't take much of a departure away from its sort of core standard tone. It is a great tone but as you'll see, the controls don't really have a very extreme range to all of them. You can kind of crank everything anywhere you want, and you still got a relatively tame, useable, very musical tone. It's just not maybe the range that I would look for in a bass preamp. Regardless, it does sound very good.

Right now, we are connected to the active input. Let's take a closer look at some of the sections here.

In he first section here, we've got our gain trim. You'll notice that we can turn it all the way off, obviously. We'll bring it up slowly. It never really overdrives though.

[OWEN CRANKS UP GAIN]

That's where I've got the gain cranked right now. It's not really breaking up. There's no harmonic distortion. Anyway, we'll bring it back down. The EQ controls have a little bit more range to them. Here's the treble [OWEN MANIPULATES TREBLE KNOB], nice musical curves here. Here's the mid control [OWEN MANIPULATES MID EQ KNOB]. Right now, we've actually got our sweepable mids over here kind of neutral so it's not going to have that much of effect, and the bass control gets pretty bassy. You can get some intense bass out of this, and that's even before we've engaged the Sonic Maximizer.

Let's move over to the parametric sweepable mids over here, and we've got our compressor obviously you can see right next to that. Now, the sweepable mids you can basically adjust the frequency that the EQ that it cues at from 250 Hz down here up to 1 Khz, so let's just crank our mid EQ up a little bit and sweep it [OWEN SWEEPS PARAMETRIC SWEEPABLE MID]. You can hear it's not like an intense like wah-wah effect; it's very subtle. [OWEN CONTINUES SWEEPS PARAMETRIC SWEEPABLE MID] I mean that's with the mids cranked. Let's scoop the mids out. [OWEN SCOOPS OUT MIDS] So there is definitely a range of bass flavors here; they're just not kind of crazy.

Our simple EQ, or rather compressor which is foot switchable, we can also turn it on with this switch right here, the green LED comes on [OWEN PLAYS BASS WITH COMPRESSOR ON]. Now as we turn this knob up, we're basically lowering the threshold, so lowering the point at which the compression actually engages. [OWEN AUDITIONS COMPRESSION SETTING] The longest release time on that compressor.

Now let's move over to the included Sonic Maximizer and hear how that affects our bass tone. Let's switch of the compressor. The Sonic Maximizer is also footswitchable, which adds some needed variety, I think, to this head here. Let's turn it on. The first dial over here is the low contour [OWEN ADJUSTS LOW CONTOUR]. That's kind of -- I think that's overdriving my head for once. That basically adds a huge amount of low end to your signal. Over here we've got the process which is the Sonic Maximizer process [OWEN TWEAKS PROCESS KNOB], basically an aural exciter. People say it improves the sound of anything it's applied to. It does definitely greatly change the sound of the bass. It's hi-fi'ing easy. So there you go.

So, all the sounds you've been hearing in this demo have come out of the balanced XLR direct out on the back of this preamp. That's typically how you'd use this amp to record. You can use it live. Obviously, the most basic solution for a live rig with this amp, with any preamp would be to just hook it up with a basic power amp like something you'd use to drive PA front-of-house speakers. If you already have a bass head that has an effects loop in, you can basically run this thing into the effects return on the effects loop. You'd run you bass directly into the preamp then into the effects return, effectively bypassing the preamp and any of the EQ controls on your bass head, on most bass heads, and that way you'd be using a -- you basically will be upgrading your preamp without having to invest in a new power amp as long as your old head's power amp works fine.

So there you go. That is the BMAX-T BBE bass preamp. I am Owen O'Malley, and you've been watching Gearwire.Com. See you later.