Along with other tube gear, Altec equipment was used for many Motown records such as The Supremes and The Temptations. When overdriven in just the right way, the tubes can add saturation and lushness. Listen to the 1967 Four Tops' "I'll Be There"--you can hear the lead vocal distort on the loud adlibs and drum fills blow up with grunge--awesome! Even when the much "cleaner sounding" transistorized gear started to show up later on, many producers stayed with the Altec 1567A for its personality and sound.

Black Rooster Audio's OmniTec-67A preamp plugin is a way to add a gritty character and/or an overdriven colorful tube sound to modern mixing. There is a choice of either an emulated Mic input impedance (with 1/2 of a 12AX7 tube gain stage and mic transformer) or Line level impedance. Each input has a different frequency response and I liked that the gain is automatically compensated when switching between inputs.

Using any of the three Tube Types, A, B, or C is a way to switch between three different brands of the modeled 12AX7 and 6CG7 tubes. Sometimes it is subtle but I hear it especially on the sound of the distortion and overall tone. The biggest jump in level is when selecting Low or High for the tube Bias. Low is great for most processing and switching to High Bias is like a turbo boost with much more distortion and level!

Lastly, I found the three-band EQ with up to +/-12dB of boost cut with separate controls for 50 Hz, 400 Hz and 1 kHz very useful for sculpting the finished sound. I thought the Phase switch mysterious as it flips the polarity of both the left and right channels' outputs relative to their inputs (Dry). With it flipped the sound "thins out" greatly and drops in level. On a bass guitar track, nearly all the low frequencies are taken out as you rotate through the Wet/Dry range. Overall, I can recommend OmniTec-67A for producing just the right touch of filth! It works great on vocals, bass and guitars--actually just about on any source!

The OmniTec-67A has an introductory price of only $49 and will go up to $99 MSRP. It comes in AAX, AU, and VST for Mac (OS X 10.9 or newer) and Windows 7 and above.