Build a guitar overdrive without opamps

When products evolve over time they tend to adopt technologies as they emerge. Not this project however, as it seems to embrace only disappearing technologies. It started with not-so-recent OTA’s and even more old-school germanium diodes, this time the designer managed to replace the output opamp by a 3046 transistor array. This famous part from the seventies of the last century, obsoleted several years ago, has been reintroduced by Texas Instruments a few years back. Extrapolating the path this project is going along we may expect version three to be built around tubes and rev 4 out of wood and flint.

Another interesting aspect of this project is its description. While most authors explain their project in a few lines, leaving a lot to guess for the readers, this poster has gone through some trouble of writing things up.

Read much, much more on Elektor Labs…