The Robin

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The Robin is a very sweet sounding passive DI box. It uses a special Sowter transformer to convert impedance and balance the signal, the result is a wide, open and sweet sounding DI signal. There is also a switch that bypasses the transformer, which allows you to connect your instrument to a pre-amp at an impedance set by the pre-amp input impedance. This was developed to match perfectly with the features of The Snow Petrel.

It was noticed early on in the Snow Petrel design process that although the pre-amp was designed to run at extremely low distortion levels with a very high gain available, it did in fact transition into saturation/distortion in an incredibly smooth and musical way when deliberately run very hot. An example of the effect of running the Robin in ‘Direct’ mode is that a guitars pickups will be loaded by the Snow Petrels input impedance in such a way that the normally encountered high mid frequency resonant peak of the pickup will be progressively lowered in frequency and smoothed out. Switching the Snow Petrel input impedance from 1200Ω down to 300Ω will exaggerate this effect. This becomes useful when something like a Telecaster bridge pickup is driving the Snow Petrel into extreme distortion. The well known ‘Icepick’ effect disappears and a fat distorted tone appears instead. DI guitars can be a very good creative part of a guitar sound, either on their own or when mixed with an amplifier/cabinet/microphone signal.

These kind of effects can be had with many available pre-amps, not to mention of course Thermionic Culture Earlybird or Rooster pre-amps. Valves will always tend to give the most musically pleasing DI distortions.