Quickie battery tube preamplifier

A great place for beginners to start and for experimenters to jump off

Bottlehead hit its stride as a manufacturer of bang for the buck preamps with the now classic $99 Foreplay 1 line stage kit. Even though that kit has been retired for years we still get calls asking us if we sell it. We all know how much prices have inflated in the 12 years since those $99 preamp kit days. Can a great sounding $99 preamp kit still be built in 2009? We decided to figure out a way, and came up with what we think is one of the coolest new ideas in tube audio.

Safe, long lasting battery power

The Quickie is a tube preamplifier kit with two, switchable inputs that runs on batteries. Sure, battery tube preamps have been done before, but with rather non linear old car radio tubes running at low voltages that required big sealed 12 volt lead acid batteries to operate. Quickie uses a stack of 9 volt batteries to deliver triple that voltage, allowing the use of much more linear directly heated 3S4 tubes. The 36 volt supply is still perfectly safe - in fact we asked one of our staff to test it by grabbing the terminals of the battery supply. He couldn't feel even the tiniest tingle. The filaments of the tubes run on a couple of D cell batteries. The tubes we use draw so little current that the preamp will run for well over 100 hours before you need to replace the batteries. And you can even try rechargables in the circuit.

Utter simplicity

The circuit is just perfect for the first time builder, because it uses so few parts and goes together in a very short time. That simplicity also makes for a very good sounding circuit, the battery power means the preamp will be super quiet and the simple wide open layout just cries out for modification with your favorite boutique audio parts. 

OK, so where's the catch?

Well, batteries are not included. Why should we charge you for batteries that have been sitting on the shelf going stale when you can buy fresh batteries for discount prices at your local Costco or Radio Shack? Members of the Bottlehead community watch for the best battery deals and report them on the Bottlehead Forum. Also the kit comes without a base,  just like the original Foreplay kit. You can build your own, buy a Hammond 1444-15 aluminum chassis for a few bucks from an electronics supplier like Mouser or Digi-Key, or we can sell you the same alder wood base kit we supply with our Seductiion phono preamp kit, for $40. And the last catch is that the chassis plate is made from acrylic plastic and the colors we get are random. Actually that makes it kind of fun - you might get blue like the Quickie shown above, red like the kit shown below, bright yellow, green, white or who knows?

Keep convincing me

OK - we took a bunch of Quickies that we converted very easily to headphone amps to a Headfi meet and folks loved them. One early adopter of the Quickie is using one between his iPod and his car stereo and he says it sounds great. Doc wants one built into a piece of PVC tubing so he can use it in a water bottle holder when he goes jogging with his iPod. Got a DIY DAC that needs a tube output stage? Give it a Quickie! The modification and customization possibilities are vast.

For crying out loud, it's $99! What are you waiting for?

Impressions

 10/30/09

10/19/09

To be honest I wasn't expecting this level of performance. I am glad I ordered 2 of them for sure. Thanks to you all for this insanely easy awesome product.

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