That’s the one!
Could you explain the starved plate design, I’ve heard bad things but I’m not super clued up on why it sounds worse than the alternative.
I'm no expert on starved plates. But yes the tube is run on 30-80 volts instead of 300-450 volts. Often the heater (which is what creates the electron cloud in the tube) is run at 75% of its normal voltage. I've seen a couple odd designs that ran the heater at higher voltage and the tube with only 12 volts across it. The attempt is to create plenty of low order distortion that varies with level of the input. Not as much as a distortion pedal on a guitar (which also sometimes use starved plates), but enough to get a sound which is claimed to be tube sound. I don't think old tube gear sounded like that. So starved plate microphone pres are one variant.
I don't know of measurements of them. Would be good to see.
Having seen measures of an ART DTI which is a transformer isolator for breaking ground loops, I'm not so sure this wouldn't give a taste of tube amp sound.
I did some quick distortion measurements of the ART DTI to see if it would perform adequately to convert RCA to balanced and back to run to a Speedwoofer 10S over shielded Cat6A. While it should not be too objectionable compared to the distortion of the sub it seems to perform quite poorly...
www.audiosciencereview.com
You'll need to push a few volts thru it with another device. But if you could control gain of the input you could select your preferred level of transformer based distortion. This device sales for about $79. But I've not had hands on with it myself.
artproaudio.com