Discontinued!
The “Crystal” is a transparent clean booster and attenuator.
There are many times when you want to increase the level of an electric guitar/bass without adding any extra distortion or coloration to the signal.
That’s where “Crystal” comes in. It is a non-truebypass transparent preamplifier that can make your guitar signal level louder up to +16db.
When it’s not in operation, a built-in buffer repairs your tone from cable impedance imbalances and restores your signal treble losses.
The “Crystal” is also smartly designed to have the possibility of attenuation(-db) of your path signal, which is many times useful during recordings or to avoid your amp’s preamplifier cranking up from a high gain distortion and adding more unwanted harmonics and distortion.
Several reasons why you might want to increase the level of your guitar signal with a clean boost:
- As a volume boost for playing solos with a pure clean guital signal.
- To match the level of a guitar with a low-output pickup to a hotter output guitar so that it’s easier to switch them onstage.
- To make your overdriven/distorted sound louder without making it more distorted by placing the “Crystal” after the overdrive/distortion or at the end of your signal chain.
- To increase the amount of distorion by placing it in front of an overdrive/distortion.
- To recover any losses from a looper pedal.
- To boost your guitar signal so that it overdrives the input of an amplifier.
As fas as gain is concerned, I was thinking that rarely someone would switch from 0db to +9db onstage and I calibrated it so that after some points(read below) to start having symmetrical signal clipping for creating gentle breakups up to +16db.
Maximum ratings:
- for 1Vp-p input reference(‘very’hot pickups), you have up to +6db transparent boost without any coloration. After that point,there is symmetrical clipping.
- for 500mVp-p input reference, you have up to +9db transparent boost without any coloration. After that point, there is symmetrical clipping.
As you can see, these are the maximum ratings, since the majority of guitar pickups vary between 100mVp-p to 500mVp-p.
- Input impedance: 1 MOhm.
- Output Impedance: 10KOhm.
- A two-way toggle switch to choose between “Clean” and “Saturation”.
- Maximum 9 VDC (center negative).
