Analogue Tube AT-101: Since 1776, America Still Undefeated Against Britain
Britain's Analogue Tube shows homage to its American allies with the Analogue Tube AT-101. This unit is a hefty reincarnation of the Fairchild 670 down to its mostly American components. However, I still don't understand how a one year old company can spend five years developing a product. I guess I'll never understand the metric system.
SPEAKER: Well, the company's name is AnalogueTube.Com, and the company was started last year, and this product that we have here is really the culmination of five years development work. The product was built from the ground up, and really in essence, what I wanted to try and do is keep the products true to the original as possible.
It's slightly difficult given that we've got 50 years between when the first product came out and the product now, but what we also have is a huge development of passive technology which has been achieved since then, and all of that technology you'll find in there. There's no active circuitry in there. It's all passive point-to-point wiring using the old wiring trees, effect-to-wiring trees that were around during the 50s. What I've tried -- What I've wanted to do and tried to achieve is make the products sort of accessible to everybody, and I suppose ultimately try to return the product back to America, which of course is its rightful owner. So, what we have here is that representation.
I've used [INDISCERNIBLE] transformers. Instantly, about 60% of the inside of the product is all American. The chassis is British, the transformers are British, the meters are British, but everything else about it is all American, and I think that's key to this product. I've tried to keep a faithful representation of all of this.
I'll give you a few technical specs. It's got a -- it has quite an enormous bandwidth actually and I -- but the product had to come out sort of ahead of me finalizing the technical aspect, so the technical specification of this product, but it has a huge input sensitivity, something approximately approximating 24 dBu. And originally, when the product was made back in 50s, as a stereo unit, it was tried like they needed to use it for record cutting, and since the advent of solid state technology, a lot of valve technology had sort of gone by the wayside, but in the last 20 years, obviously tube technology has come back up again, and here we are back with this product.
It's a classic, what I would call, classic "zombie" product. It always worked first time, and I think with the change of technology, it kind of disappeared off the radar. One of the reasons I wanted to try and recreate was to make this product accessible for everyone, not the least it's original owners which, of course, are American.
The launch of this product coincides with the launch of some new tube technology from Europe, and obviously when I started the AT-101, I wanted to be sure that I had a kind of a clear window at the end of the product that wasn't going to leave me broke and penniless. And so, obviously, this is one of the key components. It's a remote triode. It's a dual triode and it's an exact representation of the old GE five-star remote cutoff tubes that which are actually at the moment are incredibly scarce. And the launch of this product coincides with the AT-101 limiter.




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