Anyone interested in a cheap saturation unit?

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rna

Well-known member
Joined
Nov 20, 2015
Messages
52
I have been designing a saturation unit based on the Korg NuTube. I had originally designed it to use Lundahl transformers but this made the price £200 more and now I have redesigned the I/O, it turns out better sounding going solid state as the NuTube has enough colour of its own. The original design had DI inputs which were not that great and pretty unnecessary so to reduce costs I will remove them, the circuitry and the switch which intern makes the case cheaper as well as no socket will be required.
It runs as dual mono, or with the flick of a switch it puts it into MID/SIDE mode with the MIDS on the left controls and the SIDES on the right controls. This is done with a built in mid side encoder/decoder. Unlike my Portico MBP I have given full control to the mids/sides so you can for example totally turn the mids down to hear for any phase issues. You can create some crazy spatial effects with extreme settings on the sides as well, which is cool, but very dangerous as when you mono check the mix the sides disappear. Some people are not too bothered about mono compatibility so will probably love it lol.
If there is enough interest in this community I would be happy to make this available to DIY'ers. If that was the case then I would leave all opamps in standard Dip packages so people can experiment or use their favourites etc. Also if enough people are interested it would help with price breaks for the case.
I currently have some time over the holidays to see if I can shave more costs off and pay close attention to the noise floor!!
I would love to hear anyones thoughts....
Here is a demo of the '82 Moons' in mid/side mode on an unmixed track
 
I remember some discussion of your 82 Moons prototype in a thread I started long ago regarding front panel manufacturers. Is the project you're proposing here a version of that with the modifications you mentioned? I think this would be fun to build.
 
Lots of things on the benches but piques my interest. You have a rough estimate in GBP (without case) for building a functional unit? Board shipping excluded -- just to get an idea.
 

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