Strymon Fairfax

We have a new Analog drive contender

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Scrotal satire incoming.

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Really impressive sounds in the demo here. It’s an analog pedal. Curious if anyone knows what kind of stuff they’re doing in the design as they describe it:

Fairfax began as an engineering experiment, initially inspired by the original Garnet Amplifiers Herzog® tube drive unit designed for Randy Bachman in 1965. Our analog guys decided to try and recreate all of the critical elements of a custom Champ-like tube amp circuit fully in the analog domain, but small enough to fit into a pedal enclosure (so it couldn’t use real tubes or an output transformer).

The final design features a cleverly miniaturized tube preamp, Class A power amp and an ingenious custom circuit that emulates the saturation characteristics of the output transformer (which is absolutely vital to get the sound right).

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mono only! :cry:

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Haha I didn’t even catch that. I was locked on 100% analog and class A. Looks promising.

Buy two and let your Elektrons feed into it. Yes feed into the dark side.

With Analog effects you don’t always need stereo and you can track two mono tracks and make sure the left and right isn’t perfect. It gives it a more personal touch in my opinion.

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No, then I’d rather buy an ES Xenodrive. :grinning:

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This is interesting.

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Beautiful design and I love strymon but from my own experiments with similar effects designed around a guitar pickup’s output I’m dubious of how this will sound with a synth or a drum machine.

It’s certainly going to underperform for those purposes when compared to analog drive, specifically, but from the demo it sounds very flexible on guitar and the “variable sag” which is likely a voltage starvation condition that causes fuzzface circuits to sputter and make interesting noises due to the transistors going out of bias when you don’t give them the full 9 volts power (mimicking a dying battery) is something interesting to play with.

I’ll be interested to hear how it works out if anyone tries one with a drum machine though.

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Good name for a punk band

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Looking forward to other pedals in the analogue line. Or maybe they’ll just conjure a £200 passive hi pass filter.