Barcus Berry 1330 Standard Preamp

Pretty straightforward preamp - sensitivity (input gain), volume (output level), bass, and treble.

Decent-to-stupid sound quality. Not a bad sounding unit, but a basic manufacturing/design flaw in my unit really messes up the sound. My brother left this in a box years ago, I recently found it, and ended up fixing it.

I don't know if the "1330-1" version has this problem, but there is a pair of 4.7M resistors which set input bias. This really should be a trimpot, or at least closely matched resistors. In this unit the mismatch cost the preamp most of its headroom and resulted in distortion on all but the faintest of input signals.

This is easily fixable, though. Fixed I'd probably give the unit a 5 or so rating for sound quality.

No opinion, since I probably won't ever use it seriously. It sat around in a box in an unheated shed for years without getting anything worse than rusty metal bits, so it's probably pretty reliable.

Didn't bother trying to contact Barcus Berry - I'm an electronics guy, I was more interested in the challenge of fixing the problem than in getting the unit fixed.

Overall I'd give this box a pretty low rating. It's solidly constructed, but could have been smaller. And the above-mentioned design flaw counts a *lot* here - I've never been especially impressed with the engineering on BB products.