Trends are funny. Before chasing various levels of fidelity around Chris (and most of our staff actually) grew up using 4 track cassette recorders to make demos and even in some cases final products. So when people started talking about the distortion characteristics of those extraordinarily spartan and slow opamp designs, we developed a few ideas out.
The 424 mkii channel strip has not been adapted for pedal use before as far as we know. It’s definitely our favorite of the circuits we tried...mostly owing to the dazzlingly low input impedance that can load down a guitar pickup like it owes it money. Of course, high frequencies and proper impedance bridging CAN be cool too, so we incorporated a switchable buffer circuit. And of course upped the general gain without really changing much.
