Benson Preamp

I had seen the Benson used on That Pedal Show as both a preamp and in front of overdrive and distortion pedals to push them harder. Dan and Mick are awesome and have been known to make stuff sound great that lesser mortals struggle with.

Chris Benson is best known for his company’s boutique amplifiers. The Preamp, is an FET implementation of the tube preamp in the Chimera line of amplifiers. I had also read that even in a neutral state that the preamp opened things up a bit, sort of like a unison level boost but with more fine control. I arranged to try one on my board that never goes to an amplifier. I have a Strymon set up that ends at an Iridium which can go either to an Apollo interface or a pair of FRFR speakers. It is not lacking but there is always an opportunity for more and better.

More and Better?

An associate in a shop had advised that you needed to go past noon on all the knobs to get much out of the preamp and if you are looking for the preamp drive tones, I concur. However, I found that it is workable with the drive down lower and the volume up to balance. The treble knob does what you expect, but the bass knob is less a bass knob to my mind than a variable bass cut. Go counterclockwise for chime, go clockwise for grunt. I used the owner’s paper (a manual needs more than one single sided page) and tried out some of the sample configs offered and have to say they are certainly usable.

Not seeing more and better yet? Exactly.

As a sidebar, if you don’t know, the Iridium does three different amp sims, and has three different cabinet IRs to choose from, although you can use your own. The amps are what you would expect, a Fender Deluxe, an AC30 and a Marshall Plexi. The amp emulations are pretty good, not Neural Quad Cortex good but very usable. The cab IRs are also good offering a 1x12, a 2x12 and a 4x12. Unlike other products of this ilk there are no microphone or microphone placement options as in the Boss IR-200 but it has a simple and fast UI.

Play Test

Inserting the Benson first in the chain, I wanted to find the rumoured and oft touted “opening up”. I can certainly get the dirt on using the Drive option and it sounds very driven. You can even push it hard for a pseudo fuzz sound, but as I am not really a fuzz fan, I tried it then stopped. I decided to do the testing with the pushy configuration first. If I need some dirt, I can get them from the Strymon Riverside and Strymon Sunset that comes next. The Sunset has two gain options and you can stack them. With the Preamp set with the drive past noon, it pushed the other drive pedals harder and I got, wait for it, more drive.

In the non-driven setup, I wanted to see what having the Preamp turned on in front of the Volante, the Timeline, the Mobius and the Big Sky would do. I’m not sure what I expected but it was no better or different than using the Boost side of the Compadre, an always on thing for me. Then I added the compressor side in Studio mode with a big jazz box (D’Angelico Excel with D’Addario Chrome Flatwounds). That guitar is wonderfully open and warm without the Preamp, and to be honest, I could not tell a difference when the Preamp was on.

The Preamp works well with a little bit more drive rolled on with single coils to give them some bite without overdriving. I have an old Fender Rosewood Telecaster that is loaded with Suhr Andy Wood pickups and that guitar which can be a bit neutral, is more present with the Preamp turned on because of that little bit of extra bite. That Tele is the classic rosewood, so two slabs of rosewood sandwiching a thin piece of maple. It’s very heavy and has great sustain, but it is a darker instrument tonally. If I’m honest , I get better and more varied results with an Effectrode Fire Bottle or an Xotic RC Boost V2 than I did with the Benson Preamp. The Fire Bottle is tube based and costs a couple of hundred dollars more. The RC Boost V2 costs less than the Preamp.

Audio Samples

Here are three very short audio clips. They provide the sound of a Fender Rosewood Telecaster going from a Strymon Iridium in Fender Deluxe mode with the 1x12 cabinet into an Apollo interface. The UA 610-B preamp is loaded in the UNISON slot and is using the factory Electric Guitar Tone preset. I wanted to keep things as neutral as possible.

Sample One - No Effects, UA 610-B only

Sample Two - Benson Preamp in a Clean Setting with Drive at 8 o’clock, bass, treble and volume at 2 o’clock to the Apollo using the UA 610-B

Sample Three - Benson Preamp in a Drive setting with Drive at 2 o’clock, volume at 9 o’clock, bass and treble at noon to the Apollo using the UA 610-B

Other Thoughts

The Preamp by Benson is built tough, with large easy to handle knobs with easy to read screening. The one that I got is what they call the tuxedo colour way, black on white. I always recommend running pedals, especially pedals with drive capability off an isolated power supply. I am not hearing noise from the Benson as a result of power, but I can hear some rumbling and crackling from the FRFR speakers when the guitar is muted at the tuner and the Benson is on. When I turn it off, the noise vanishes, so I can only conclude that the device is creating the noise. Bass, treble and volume are at 2 o’clock, and drive is at 8 o’clock so nothing is getting pushed. I did not notice that noise at all when running into the Apollo so more research would be required on my part if I chose to. All I know is that with the pedal on, there is noise and with it off, or removed completely, there is not. I could understand that if I had the drive turned up, but it was as low as I could go and still get noise out of the pedal.

Has it ever happened that you tried something that was being hyped and paraded and you really could not get the lauded results? When something is heavily hyped, does it create unrealistic expectations? Here’s what I know from my test. The Benson Preamp sounds good. However, I never got near what other reviewers said that I should expect and to be fair, I sure did not get $324 CAD more and better. I have decent amps, and spending a bit of time on the amp controls, I can get what I need without having to add the Benson Preamp. When I returned the evaluation unit, the other guys at the shop asked me what I thought and I told them what I am telling you. To a person, they agreed. We all had heard so much about this pedal, and when we tried it, it didn’t make a big difference and we all tried different setups. And if I want to be picky. it’s not really a preamp because the output is not in the true preamp impedance range. If you want to understand that, I would refer you to That Pedal Show where Dan Steinhardt went through the architecture of true preamps in great detail. It’s not like a Kingsley preamp that could go straight to a power amp, or my Effectrode Blackbird that can do the same. That doesn’t make the Benson Preamp bad, but after spending several hours with it, I came away rather underwhelmed. Your use cases are likely different and your opinions could be very different. In my case, this pedal dork will not be outlaying any monies to add one to my kit.

Thanks very much for reading. If you have questions on this or any other related topic, please complete the form here and submit it so that I can get back to you. Until next time, peace.