Sales and R&D

Despite the pandemic, so far this year LBA has seen a growth in sales of 25% over its best year, which was 2018.  I'm beyond words with my great appreciation for the people like you who have helped to support my electrical endeavors during these difficult times.  The 2020 Instrument Transformer has sold 170 units since its release earlier this year (as of this post).  Compared to the big companies that's a drop in the bucket, but for a one-man hand-made operation, I think its not too shabby.  Thank you! 

I have a fair quantity of products built and ready to ship.  Because of this I've been spending my time over the past month working on 2 things.  Number 2 is something the average bassist will appreciate and that's below.  Number 1 is my beloved Trinity channel strip design.  I'm working harder than ever on this and making great headway in all avenues (and there's a lot of avenues).  The channel strip design has been complete in the sense of a working model that I'm 100% pleased with the performance of, as of October.  The primary goal right now is to make it easy to build.  I'll quote myself, "So easy a Grandma could put it together."  The internals will be modular so if anything goes bad a module can be swapped out instead of having to send the whole channel strip in for repair.  I haven't seen a failure from one yet.  My oldest (in my possession) prototype is still performing like new after serving my studio for about 2 years.  The earliest prototypes go back to over 5 years ago, many of which were sold and some decommissioned.  Of those sold I haven't heard of any failures or issues, though I'm aware of some bugs with the early ones.  At this point the design is becoming very mature and nearly ready for market.  I hope to be able to offer the Trinity as a complete system sometime by the end of 2021.  There are a couple other complimentary products that will be offered at the same time.

2.  The past two day's I've been working on a vacuum tube powered DI Box which will be the size of one of my old pedals (Hammond 1590BB enclosure).  Further design requirements are that it runs on 9V DC and draws less than 350mA.  Well, as of today I have a working model that sounds quite special in my own opinion.  It runs a single Nuvistor vacuum tube into an LBA-MC15 transformer.  That's the same transformer as the TI Box.  The system takes a 9V DC input at 320mA and converts it to 231V DC for the B+ to power the tube and drops it down to 5.8V for the heater filament of the tube.  The filament is designed to operate at 6.3V, but with a NOS tube it will operate properly with a supply voltage as low as 4.5V.  I have chosen to run the filament voltage a little below 6.3V to extend life without affecting performance.  Initial testing of the design has shown a THD of 1.25%, which in my opinion isn't super low, but its just low enough to sound clean while displaying the sexy qualities of the "tube sound."  The frequency response is beyond what I can measure in my lab, although I do have alternate equipment in my studio which can give me better insight - in the future when I do that.  What I measured in the lab is a response from 10Hz-25kHz with very little deviation from linearity.  Basically, its a good clean tube circuit with a bit of natural tube mojo allowed through.  A feature of this design that will be unique and borrowed from my Trinity design is the "Brilliance" control.  This is literally the exact circuit pulled from the Trinity.  I measured on my spectrum analyzer a shelving boost of nearly 10dB with this knob starting at 10kHz.  Playing my bass with this knob fully up was preferable to me.  I really liked the articulation it added.  Overall the total amount of clean boost this DI provides has not yet been determined, but it is substantially louder than a passive DI Box.   The noise floor in preliminary tests was inaudible.  More scientific tests need to be conducted to determine exact figures.  Pricing is yet to be determined.  Available quantity is however, very finite.  I will only make 68 of these boxes.  That is because I only have 68 of these nuvistor vacuum tubes in stock and due to current market prices I don't intend to buy more.  I will make a promise right now that I will only make 68 of these boxes.  This is a collectors piece for sure!  
Orders are not being accepted at this time, but if interested please email [email protected] to get on the first-come-first-serve email list.