Fairfax Class A Output Stage Drive Pedal

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Seller's description

The Story Fairfax was inspired by the original Garnet Amplifiers Herzog® unit designed for Randy Bachman in 1965. Bachman wanted the sustain of a cello for his electric guitar, so he started running the speaker output of a small combo amplifier into the input of another larger amplifier while chasing that sound. Unfortunately, that scenario has a tendency to blow up the combo amplifier (sometimes in dramatic fashion!), so Bachman enlisted Gar Gilles to design a device that would behave in a similar way but not actually catch fire. Gar’s design ended up being a small tube amp based around a 12ax7 and 6v6 tube, with a built-in speaker load so that it wouldn’t blow up. The result is the classic sustaining lead sound from songs like “American Woman” by The GuessWho. More Than A Drive Pedal Fairfax began as an engineering experiment, with the goal being to recreate all of the critical elements of the original circuit fully in the analogue domain, but small enough to fit into a pedal enclosure. With JFETs in place of the tube stages and an ingenious custom circuit that emulates the characteristics of the output transformer (which is integral to the sound), Fairfax delivers the real-deal performance of the original unit, without the need for a 250V tube power supply. There’s even a variable Sag circuit that behaves just like a real tube amp does, by dynamically varying the amount of available current to the preamp and power amp sections independently, based upon how much signal is being sent to the power amp and how hard the guitar is played. At low Sag values, the behaviour is mild and closer to a solid state rectifier, and at max value,s the JFETs can go crazy and unbias - which gates the input, leading to spitting and chortling sounds more commonly associated with gated fuzzes. In order for Fairfax to behave like a real amplifier, it needed a ton of operating voltage, so a transformer-based power supply converts the 9VDC input voltage to 40V internally. This gives Fairf