Little Bear B4-X tube headphone amplifier (2020s) - 1000 epochs

The Little Bear BX-4 is a compact portable hybrid headphone amplifier built around a pair of Raytheon JAN 5784WB miniature tubes and two Oracle 2 op amps. It is designed as an energy-efficient headphone power device, offering modest but clean output for a wide range of headphone impedances. Although marketed primarily for headphone listening, its hybrid circuit can also operate in certain line-level setups, which gives it some versatility for adding tube coloration to different sources. I have used it with almost everything including musical instruments, mixers, tape decks and various players. It consistently adds sweet harmonics thanks to the way its internal architecture drives the Raytheon JAN 5784WB tubes. For this capture I set the Little Bear to its maximum position to let the harmonics open up fully and provide a broader and more expressive tone while still keeping the source intact. For this capture I then ran the output into my tube preamp equipped with a NOS Brimar 12AU7 / ECC82 WA tube. The resulting tone is overdriven, warm and open, shaped to work naturally with all kinds of instruments.