We've been taking a really close look at the "stuff in the basement". Dusty stuff. Old stuff. Stuff that doesn't even work anymore. We all seem to be obsessed with the notion that there's something from way back then that we missed. Or we finally found an excuse that legitimizes our need to keep what others consider "useless" around: "See honey, it's a good thing I didn't toss that old Webcor last Spring (like you wanted me to). This stuff's coming back." Useless indeed!

    Leading the obsession hitparade is anything that uses tubes. Here's an industry that has literally been pulled back from the brink of extinction. It deserves a second chance. The first shot was inconclusive. We were just beginning to get serious with tube designs when any further progressive development was cut short by the introduction of the transistor. The transistor was supposed to be the answer, so we did the human thing and chucked the old for the new. Then hindsight comes heavily into play...after a while.

    Not everything that incorporated tubes was inherently brilliant. There was good and bad. What all tube designs do well is to follow musical transients with a minimum of effort. This is what we're all responding to now. It's a technology that can't touch the specs, the ergonomic features, or the price of contemporary solid state products but it responds well musically. We just can't get enough of that, can we?

    This is why the tube and digital domains are seemingly so compatible. Digital is hard to beat for ease of storage and manipulation. Tube analog gear is a natural choice for processing analog stuff, like music. What we're realizing is that maybe it's a good idea to let digital and analog do whet they are each best at.

    And the market, new and used, has responded to the new demand. The used market responded by hiking up the price of the "vintage gear" by as much as 10 times (so far). The new market has responded with a number of new manufacturers of tube equipment. Much of this gear is a reissue of older, highly coveted units. This is good. Aren't we all still looking for a couple of Pultec EQ's that won't drain the account dry. The Teletronix LA-2A, The Fairchild 670?

    What seems to be missing in the new tube industry is progress. There is a notion that this mellow technology is incapable of innovation. That's where Retrospec comes in. We are committed not only to the use of tubes, but to expanding the way tubes are used. Our designs use no input or output transformers.

    Why not, you ask. Well, once upon a time, transformers were a cheap and easy way to get in on out of an audio processor. That was when our performance expectations were a whole lot more modest. If the signal chain could get down to around 40 hertz and up to 16k and manage to keep the distortion to somewhere under 1% we'd thought we died and went to Heaven. As luck would have it, we're just never satisfied. To make the grade today, the performance of all audio systems today have to exceed what was once considered to be the physical limits of human perception.

    Consequently, it's become just about impossible to design a transformer that is totally free of sonic aberrations. Totally transparent. Free of nastiness like, frequency dependent phase shift, transient distortion, transient overshoot, ringing, intermodulation distortion, plain old everyday distortion. We've gone and set things up so that we're now painfully aware of all these things. With a couple of hundred thousand years of "progress" behind us, you'd think we'd have gotten this compulsion under control.

    OK. One slick way to get rid of transformer born maladies is to get rid of the transformer. Bingo! Well, maybe not quite bingo. Getting a tube to do the job once performed by a transformer places demands in other areas, like the power supply. But hark! What would once have added a couple thousand BTU and ten pounds to the weight of a unit in the tube's heyday can now be designed very efficiently using solid state components. Hey, finally here's a place where silicon makes total sense.

    What we wind up with is on audio processor featuring pristine transient response, extended range and clarity to the low end (remember, no transformer to saturate), very low noise, and that tube harmonic richness that we know and love. All of the good stuff and none of the bad. Now, how often in life does that occur?

    So, if you've been ambivalent about whether to go for the warmth and character of the tube analog world or plug into the clarity and precision of contemporary audio processors, relax! Contact Sliding Delta Sales to find out how you can check out the "Juice Box" or the "Squeeze Box" from retrospec!