28/07/2026
On the Bench:
Handcrafted Labs Affinity A2 Full Tube Dual Mic Preamp
I picked this up a few weeks ago, but with the hot weather, it failed. After a bit of testing, I tracked the problem to one of the voltage regulators responsible for heater voltage to the lights and two of the tubes. As you can see in the second photo, it’s using the bottom of the chassis as its heatsink. Unfortunately, I don’t have the space to keep it in the open so that it can dissipate heat more effectively, so I decided to give it a more robust cooling system. I installed two heatsinks and replaced the failed regulators, and now it’s good as new and sounds incredible.
Hats off to HCL on such a clean circuit design. I believe this particular unit was custom-built for DZZ, maybe Handcrafted Labs can fill in a bit of its history. It features transformer-balanced mic/line in and out, two triodes per channel, Hi-Z, and stepped attenuators for perfectly matching stereo inputs, as well as output potentiometers for rebalancing after the tubes, which is very useful. It can be very clean and has a very pleasing distortion when pushed. The natural compression of the tubes is very subtle and transparent, and for me, it provides a less compressed DI tone than my UA 6176’s 610 section.
