vigilante398
Authorized Vendor
This one has been in the works for a long while (as @Mike McLane can attest) but I finally got a version I'm happy with. The Alembic F-2B was the first high-voltage tube pedal I ever made, and it remains a super cool tone to keep in one's arsenal.
I've always liked being able to hide the tube inside the enclosure to keep it safe from stray stomping, but I also want to make things moderately easy for people to assemble. In past designs I sacrificed usable real estate and solid layouts for simplicity of assembly, and I wanted to find a happy middle ground that still wasn't a nightmare to put together but that gave me more room to work with. This utilizes a "daughter board" for the tube to mount on with right-angle headers similar to what I do for my commercial builds, but it's offset so the tube socket doesn't cover the pins, which makes it easier to assemble and easier to troubleshoot if the soldering job wasn't perfect. I also used vertical header pins to connect the footswitch PCB to the main PCB, because I've always liked doing that. It reduces the number of wires floating around and looks nice and clean. The catch is the drilling has to be spot-on, so naturally I will be providing pre-milled enclosures and will also get a Tayda drill template put together for it for those that prefer to go that route (which I totally understand).
I only ordered 5 PCBs initially to try it out so I don't have these ready for sale yet, but I will be sending a board out to an external tester to make sure it's repeatable, then I'll stock up on boards and have these available. This one will be a little more expensive than my previous offerings partially because there are now two additional PCBs but mostly because the main PCB is a 4-layer board with internal power and ground planes. This is typically unnecessary in pedal circuits, but I consider it to be "best design practice" and it helps tame noise and oscillations, so I'm going to be doing it for everything going forward.
I've always liked being able to hide the tube inside the enclosure to keep it safe from stray stomping, but I also want to make things moderately easy for people to assemble. In past designs I sacrificed usable real estate and solid layouts for simplicity of assembly, and I wanted to find a happy middle ground that still wasn't a nightmare to put together but that gave me more room to work with. This utilizes a "daughter board" for the tube to mount on with right-angle headers similar to what I do for my commercial builds, but it's offset so the tube socket doesn't cover the pins, which makes it easier to assemble and easier to troubleshoot if the soldering job wasn't perfect. I also used vertical header pins to connect the footswitch PCB to the main PCB, because I've always liked doing that. It reduces the number of wires floating around and looks nice and clean. The catch is the drilling has to be spot-on, so naturally I will be providing pre-milled enclosures and will also get a Tayda drill template put together for it for those that prefer to go that route (which I totally understand).
I only ordered 5 PCBs initially to try it out so I don't have these ready for sale yet, but I will be sending a board out to an external tester to make sure it's repeatable, then I'll stock up on boards and have these available. This one will be a little more expensive than my previous offerings partially because there are now two additional PCBs but mostly because the main PCB is a 4-layer board with internal power and ground planes. This is typically unnecessary in pedal circuits, but I consider it to be "best design practice" and it helps tame noise and oscillations, so I'm going to be doing it for everything going forward.
The Alembic F-2B is basically the preamp of the Fender Dual Showman, this is obviously just a single channel version of that.
