Vacuum tubes

First Product: Designed in 2005, the Tube Equipment Corporation SR 71 is my take on the infamous Fairchild 670 tube compressor from the 60's. With 17 tubes and weighing in at nearly 50 pounds, this $7000 tube beast has many happy customers and well-known popular recordings to it's credit! 

During the production of the Tube Equipment Corporation SR 71 Compressor, it became crucial to obtain large quantities of the main Remote Cutoff gain reduction tubes and hand select them for best THD and plate curve matching. Even with a Tektronix curve tracer, doing this manually was terribly inefficient so I designed an automated tube curve tracer of my own which would select batches of 8 tubes at a time for one unit. Automating the process cut this task time down dramatically.

Buoyed by the results of the massive SR 71 Tube Compressor and also looking to go beyond old 60's designs, I tried to embark out on my own and do something new in the tube audio recording gear market. That something was to take my basic circuit from the previous product and automate it using motorized controls and a Microcontroller to manage things. WiFi remote control and storage of preferred settings made it easy to recall previous sessions, a requirement in the modern studio.