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Engine Room LVL 12

This pedal is based on our now famous amp-in-a-box Preamp pedal with one important tweak: the replacement of the first FET transistor with a germanium gain stage - stolen from our servo-biased Germanium Boost pedal which is ideal as a versatile gain stage since it reliably imparts a germanium tonality, mostly doesn’t care about temperature, and doesn’t affect frequency response. The result is an alternate universe take on our flagship pedal that marries the incomparable feel of the germanium with the careful equalization and tone controls of the preamp pedal. 

The result is a slightly lower gain, but richer sounding and feeling overdrive/boost/fuzz/whatever we really, really dig. We hope you like it!

Demo by Sasha Ivantic

Demo by collector//emitter

Product Page

Review by The Gear Page

Germanium Preamp 

The Germanium Fuzz is a fuzz pedal.  The knobs change the sounds.
This pedal is designed around two germanium 2N527 OR 2N404 Germanium Transistors.  They have been graded for gain and leakage and carefully matched to sound their best.  They are set up in the ubiquitous 60’s circular fuzz topology, and tuned for good sound, and include some additional oddities aimed at solving the issues that prevent more widespread use of Germanium devices.

THE FIRST FUZZ PEDAL WITH AUTOMATIC THERMAL BIAS TECHNOLOGY
The bias of the transistors in this pedal is automatically regulated by a circuit that GENTLY warms the transistors to a preset operating point using analog components, and ensures a consistent sound, no matter the external temperature. 

Review by That Guitar Lover

Demo by Mike Hermans

Demo by Pedal of the Day

Manual

Germanium Fuzz

We call this our Preamp because it is! The circuit is based on the our Chimera 30 watt guitar amplifier, but substitutes FET transistors for the vacuum tubes. The result is an extremely amp-like and versatile clean boost/overdrive/fuzz pedal that imparts rich harmonics and a very musical EQ to your signal chain…truly a Chimera in a box!

Demo by Reverb

Preamp

The Cast Iron Stonk Box is a collaboration between KGR Harmony in Oshu, Japan and Knobhead PDX. We’ve known about Keijiro’s cast iron pedals for a while… He has a fantastic pedal line that utilize hand forged iron enclosures (in a foundry that also creates traditional cast iron tetsubin teapots… We recommend looking up the history of these… It is fascinating). 

Keijiro visited us a couple years ago and we floated the idea of doing a run of Benson Pedals using cast iron… He instantly said yes!

We reached out to Paige at Knobhead PDX to create some cool custom knobs for the project… We were going for something elemental that would offset the cold brutality of the iron with some warmth and light. We settled on a clear amber-ish resin which we feel achieves the effect we wanted nicely. 

Demo by WJB3

Demo by Noise Generator

Review by reddit /guitarpedals

Review by Guitar.com

Stonk Box - Cast Iron Limited Edition

When designing the temperature controlled fuzz, we tried some unusual approaches. One false start utilized a voltage controlled error correction circuit to bias a single germanium transistor. It ultimately didn’t work for the fuzz, which is comically sensitive to transistor gain attributes. 

We did find a place for it though. 

It turns out it was PERFECT for achieving a germanium clean boost that, (like our fuzz) is impervious to component drift, leakage, and temperature....moreso in fact. We also fixed a couple other issues preventing the germanium transistor from being used as a convinc- ing linear boost...we increased the input headroom (even a normal guitar signal will drive a germanium transistor into unwanted input distortion without some tweaks) and increased the input impedance (a BJT transistor would normally thin out bass frequencies and interact negatively with whatever flows into it). 

The result is a germanium clean boost that can utilize a germanium transistor WITHOUT the weird artifacts that were previously accepted as part of the deal...temperature sensitivity, drift, and suboptimal input impedance and headroom. 

After the boost is first powered up, it takes about ten seconds before the error correction circuit correctly biases the germanium transistor After this things get interesting....we can hear how having the boost engaged makes guitar signals sound more musical...even when set at the same volume as the bypassed tone. Notes are given a simultaneously smoother and more detailed character, like a compressor but different. Some people we’ve shown it to have noted that it appears to deemphasize the unwanted parts of a signal and enhance the good. It’s killer on bass. It helps acoustic guitar pickups sound more natural. And of course it’ll push your amp into a frenzy. 

Demo by JayLeonardJ

Demo by Demos In the Dark

Demo by AndyDemos

Germanium Boost (Black) by Benson Amps

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