JOE WALLACE: I'm Joe Wallace for Gearwire.Com and I'm on the floor with Dave McCarthy from Damage Control. How are you?

DAVE MCCARTHY: I'm great. How are you?

JOE WALLACE: Good. Now you've got some new stompboxes. These are analog-digital combos. Tell me a little bit about these and what made you guys decides to stick tubes and digital together.

DAVE MCCARTHY: Great. Now let me go through it with you. We've got two new offerings. One is called the Glass Nexus which is a premium multi-effects, three full-time effects at once. They process at 96 kHz so 96 kHz processing with an analog dry path, and the reason for that is we want to maintain the connection between guitar and amp and make sure that that's pure, and when we do add an effect, we added at the very highest resolution to be as transparent as possible and preserve the guitar players tone. The thing that's hybrid about our products is that we use two tubes as sort of the buffer stage, going in and out of the DSP, and we like tubes because they can provide either sort of an audiophile amount of headroom, so you can have like really huge dynamic range before you process, or you can sort of futz it up like if you're going into like a Leslie sound and you want to get a little bit of grit, you can hit the tubes with that. Our tubes are running at 250 volts, which is really unique. Most people who have tubes in their products usually have like a wall-wart which is only 9 volts, so you certainly can't make a tube run at 250 volts unless you use what's called a switched mode power supply, so we have that in our products which takes the 9 volts, cranks it up into 250 volts, and then you get what a real amp runs at, so it sounds like a real amp because it is basically a real amp. So, the Glass Nexus is a multi-effects processor. It will do things like UniVibe, tri-stereo chorus, you know, sort of vintage. When it comes to modulation effects, we provide sort of vintage stuff. When it comes to delays, you can use our we call it Smear so you can go lo-fi with it, hi-fi with it, and the tubes will cooperate in sort of smearing it up, distorting it, or acting pristine and giving kind of like radical dynamic range headroom kind of stuff.

The other product is called Time Line, and what Time Line is it's only one effect at a time, and it's all delay-based effects but it's got like ridiculous amounts of control, so if a guy's like just a nut about like ping pong, he wants like extreme depth and delay lines running all over the place, this thing is really complex in terms of how many handles you can put on how many things. It will also be like rotary cabs and chorus because those are effects based on delay algorithms. It uses the same tubes, it has the same 96-kHz processing, same analog dry path kind of stuff.

JOE WALLACE: Now, what about the DIY musician who they for some reason they've damaged the tube or the tube just wears out, and they need to replace it. Is there a user friendly accessibility thing there?

DAVE MCCARTHY: Yeah. Get yourself a little Allen wrench and unscrew it, pull the glass off, pull the tube out, hot dam. You know we -- of course, we recommend a technical someone who's a qualified service personnel to do it but there's a lot of qualified people when it comes to tubes these days so you can try and make that happen.

JOE WALLACE: Now you're going to demo a couple of these pedals for us, right?

DAVE MCCARTHY: Yeah. Right now, we're going to do the Glass Nexus. What I've got going is sort of a UniVibe with a little bit of a smeared-up delay and some ambient reverb. The reverb in these boxes is just ridiculous. I mean, if you think about what you can buy that's 96-kHz reverb, you know there's a lot of rack-mount processors for 2,500 bucks that does one effect at a time at 96 kHz. What we're doing is three at a time with sort of tube contribution stuff which just sort of speaks artistically more to a guitar player kind of thing. So what we're going to hear now is a little bit of ambience, a little bit of sort of lo-fi delay, and a UniVibe.

[DAVE MCCARTHY PLAYING GUITAR LICKS THROUGH GLASS NEXUS]