Some exciting cool news for our ever-popular little problem-solver boxes. I'm excited to talk about both flavors of ourr long-running reamp design, as well as finally 'making official' our Signal Art direct box at long last.
Both the original (transparent) ReAmp and the slightly, tastefully 'coloured' AngReAmp are back in stock for a limited time, now in a newly updated glossy hammertone finished steel enclosure, looking more handsome than ever before.
Now let's talk about the DI box, the new guy in town! Well, sort of. I've been making some version of my ReAmp design since around 2002 or 2003 (over twenty years), although its gone through several permutations... Direct boxes, I've actually been making even longer, all the way back to some time in the 1990's, and there have been even far more permutations! I make them every year for clients, usually based around Cinemag's or Jensen's premium direct box transformer (I've made half a dozen this year probably); yet for some reason I never got around to 'making it official'. It's never been on my website, always by request, and I've always just taken the requests and milled them out on a drill press from a standard enclosure, and sold it directly. I guess part of the reason I never released it as a product was because (unlike my ReAmp), I didn't feel like I was offering anything new with it. It's just a well built box, made from what I consider the best available transparent/wide bandwidth DI transformer. But... people like these builds, and many people who also do re-amping like to 'complete the circuit' using an all SAE path if they can. So, at VERY long last... we have finally made the Signal Art direct box 'official' and finally given it a home here on the website. So now you can order it without having to send me a special request under the table, etc. I'm sorry it took forever to make it happen; but its finally here as of today.
Perhaps another reason I didn't make it official is because for 15 years or more, my favorite DI transformer has been the Cinemag CM-DBX, and Cinemag have usually been too booked up to do very short runs of parts for little guys... and I'm happy for their success. I didn't want to go into production with a lesser transformer. The CM-DBX has a transparency and bandwidth that probably rivals any active DI (minus the noise and THD), and its pretty high headroom too. I can remember when I first got into recording, reading that passive DI's had some high frequency rolloff and phase shift compared to active. That may have been true for early and cheaper models; but the CM-DBX is ruler-flat in terms of phase and frequency response from 20hZ to 20k, and only 3dB down at 150k. I knew that if I wanted to go into production on a SAE DI, it had to be that part. Thankfully I was able to get Cinemag to find the time to make me a beautiful short production run of these fine parts. However, I do not know if I can always procure this part, so this direct box should be considered a limited run, and you should not wait too long if you wish to have one.
As many people know, I've been slowly steering this company more towards new and original mic builds, and this is why we have not added many mic mods over the last few years (and in fact, have taken down about half of them). With that, I have to also announce the sad news that our DI box and both reamp models will be discontinued around the end of the year. Either this production run or the very next one (depending on how fast they move) will be the very last runs that we do. By end of year, they will be unavailable. There's a bit more to this story than I can share at the moment; but suffice it to say, if anyone wants one of these handmade beauties, the clock is beginning to tick down. Be sure not to miss out, and of course also stay tuned for more info about these in the coming months!
thanks,
Chad