Viking PB-60

A two-knob playback preamp that Viking sold for less than the price of a decent cartridge, and that its own catalog treated as half of a stereo pair.

Overview

The PB-60 was never meant to stand alone. Viking built it as the playback preamplifier for the FF75 tape deck series. The company's catalog copy is blunt about it: one PB-60 gives you a monaural playback chain, and two PB-60s are required for stereo. The same point shows up in the magazine's advice column, where a reader asking about two-channel preamps was pointed toward Viking in Minneapolis and told plainly that the PB60 came in pairs for stereo work.

What you got for the money was minimal. Two controls: a volume level control and a variable equalization control. The volume pot could be set to a fixed level so it wouldn't overload the downstream music-system amplifier, or it could serve as the system volume control outright. That helped in an era when "component system" meant whatever combination of boxes the owner had assembled. The equalization control was the more interesting half. It let the user dial response anywhere from 7 dB above to 7 dB below the NARTB playback curve at 10,000 cps, which is a real range for trimming a tape library that wasn't all recorded to the same standard. Bass boost extended down to 25 cps. Viking's literature also specifies exact NARTB equalization as the baseline, which is the correct target for quarter-track consumer tape of the period.

The rest of the numbers are modest but honest for a small outboard preamp. Signal-to-noise ratio is quoted at 60 dB without selected tubes. That matters because hand-picked low-noise tubes were a common way for manufacturers to hit their best figures, and Viking is admitting the 60 dB number doesn't depend on cherry-picking. Output is 1 volt at high impedance, which is enough to drive the line input of a typical integrated amplifier or the auxiliary input of a console.

Price is where the PB-60 gets confusing. Viking's own advertising in Tape-Recording (December 1956, p.42) listed the PB60 at $24.50. A separate catalog entry from the same period gives $29.50 and spells out the same two-control layout and the same 60 dB signal-to-noise figure. The gap is small enough that it likely reflects a price change, a different dealer sheet, or a distinction between the preamp alone and the preamp with its case. The documentation doesn't say which, so treat any single quoted price as approximate. Either way, the PB-60 sat at the very bottom of the Viking tape chain, well under the RP61 record/playback amplifier that owners added when they wanted to record rather than just play back.

That role explains why the PB-60 is scarce now. It was an accessory, sold to people who already owned an FF75 deck, and it was the kind of thing that got separated from its deck decades ago and tossed in a box. The preamps do surface. A classified ad in the same era's tape press shows a Viking FF-75SU sold as a package with two PB60 playback preamps, the whole set having seen four hours of use and offered at $130 against a $170 cost.

For a collector, the appeal is narrow. It is a period-correct way to get an early FF75 transport making sound again, and the variable equalization control is useful rather than decorative. The catch is that a single PB-60 is only half a stereo system, and buying one without its mate means hunting a second unit of the same vintage with the same tube complement. Expect the usual service needs of mid-1950s tube gear: capacitors, tubes, and a careful check of the volume and equalization pots. They are the only two things on the front panel, so they are the only two things that can wear out from use.