From Bartell employee Doug Donaghue:
” I can absolutely guarantee that I built that one (in my garage) because I -designed- it and layed out the single-sided printed circuit board that it’s built on, taped up the artwork, printed the silkscreen, hand cut and resist screened the circuit boards, drilled them, etched them (that etching solution is nasty stuff), soldered in all of the components, and tested them. There were only 100 of them ever built and I built every last one of them with my very own two little hands. <g>
Inside it’s a fairly simple little transistor amplifier (IIRC I used a 2N2222) that’s biased near cut-off so that the tops of the signal get ‘clipped’ and cause a lot of odd-order harmonic distortion. I wanted to re-mix the original signal with the distorted signal inside the box, but Ted convinced me that it would be better to bring the 2 signals out so that the performer could put them through 2 channels of their amplifier and adjust the tone and volume of each independently.”
