Having the REDDI as my goto tube DI for years, and had always been curious about that famous Noble tube preamp that many players swear about.   I’m lucky enough to borrow one from my bass friend Terry who lives not too far away and kind enough to lend me his for a test drive.   

For the fun of it, I’ve included my Bergantino B|Amp with the BFT drive on into the comparison

Video clip:

Here comes my homemade setup:

Recording / Mixing

Balanced DI out from all 3 boxes, into RME-UFX's line-in , input level on UFX set to unity for REDDI and B|Amp, level matched by tweaking the output gain of the REDDI and input gain of B|Amp, added another 6dB for Noble to match the volume between all 3.   

Settings on the 3 boxes:

- REDDI has no tone control, <- I dig
- Noble has slight bass boost <- very smooth
- B|Amp EQ is flat, input gain is slightly hot for more preamp colour, BFT Overdrive effect on, drive at 2, Vol at 14 for the tube saturation

Basses:

- Passive 5 string 60s style Precision (Alleva Coppolo KBP5CS) bass with Labella low tension flat, tone slightly rolled off
- Active 5 string Stingray (Stingray 5 Special HH) on the bridge pickup, stock nickel strings, 1 notch of treble cut, and 1 notch of bass boost.  Taralabs master cable is being used. 

Output stage:

UFX analog line out (drum machine output blended on Totalmix) into Apogee Jam 96k with moderate volume (not at a hot level to prevent hardware compression/limiting) , into iPhone 13 pro and recorded with built in camera app.   3 clips were put together after with iMovie .   

Thoughts: 

We’re in the era where there’s no bad/crappy gears out there.   I can do quality recording or performlive in front of crowd of any size with any of these tube flavour signal processors ..   Noble with pbass seemed to be the best match for that smooth buttery rnb tone ..    REDDI seemed raw and wild in comparison for pop/rock , b|amp with bft o/d sits between the 2 and still give that round and open sound with some tube saturation ..    I'm very impressive with the performance from the B|Amp where the build-in o/d can get archive great result on par with the other 2.    All signals in the recording are straight from the preamp/di into recorder with zero processing.     

Noble vs REDDI ? 

One of them is a tube DI, and one is a preamp with tone shaping.  The concept is different but you can sort of match the output level and compare them that way, which is what I did .. 

I’ve been using the REDDI for years, love the simplicity of it and it covers my tube needs ..    Alone with my 1073 style preamp/di, it's all I need to record quality bass signals that cover all styles.    when things don’t sounded right, REDDI is probably the last piece that could possibly go wrong.     Noble preamp is the holy grail of tube preamp in a pedal form.   It matches perfectly with pbass for that smooth soul/rnb stuffs ..   My only complain is that I believe Noble has separated tube circuitry that process the DI output and the 1/4” output ..   my cheap ass mind sees that using the XLR/DI output only utilize half of its cost, not money well spent unless I’m always using both outputs.     Since I already have something that provides me similar result, I don’t think it's worth the investment  ..   the 9/18v pedal power supply is gimmicky imo.   I love the 2 band boost only EQ, very musical , and they don’t behave the same as the 2 band boost EQ on Coppolo basses(I had that question for a long time), there’s a risk that you can boost things too much and getting undesirable results.

I hope these info is helpful, 

Tree