Benson Amps Stonk Box Fuzz

The Benson Amps Stock Box Fuzz is the latest creation from Portland's finest handmade amplifier company, perfectly capturing the sound and dynamic feel of a vintage 'MK1' style Fuzz with some excellent modern features that remove some of the drawbacks of using vinatge Germanium based fuzz pedals. 

Like the Germanium Fuzz before it, the Stonk Box attempts to take a classic 1960’s fuzz design, and bring the sound into the modern world without bringing any along the flaws and inconsistencies of the original. Keeping the original controls (FILTER and VOLUME), and adding a TONE control and a TRIM control to expand the palette of sounds available. The game changing feature is the temperature control technology, designed to keep the Germanium transistors at optimum working temperature, no matter the external environment. When the LED is orange, the circuit is warming up. When it goes green, the ideal temperature has been achieved and the warmer turns off. It's normal for this LED to toggle back and forth between orange and green as it does its work to keep the transistors operating at the perfect temperature.

Controls

• Trim is a gain control right before the two amplifying germanium transistors...turned all the way up is how the stock design is all the time.

• Filter manipulates both the gain and the bias point of the first gain stage. When turned down it will take away gain, bass frequency response, and will bring in to a gentle dynamic expander type effect (where quiet notes will be quieter than normal, the opposite of a compressor) TRIM and FILTER are interactive and there are many different flavors of fuzz and distortion to dial in. This pedal will not clean all the way up, even at low trim volumes there will be some distortion (in a nice way). This control will crackle a bit when turned, since there is some DC across it.

• Tone is a low pass filter at the end of the circuit, carefully designed to act almost like a tilt EQ to balance the bright attack and full body of the sound, made possible by the original circuit being WAY brighter than the bypassed guitar signal...we think we’ve struck a good balance here.

• Volume is the output level...which we’ve increased many orders of magnitude from the original. We took the training wheels off so you can push the front end of your amp into sonic madness (if you want). NOTE: this user-beware approch can also lead to settings with a high noise floor. Please remember, this is a crazy and primitive fuzz at its heart...not a piece of pristine recording equipment. Let’s just say there were good reasons for the next four historic revisions of this particular product. If you are concerning people with a high level of hiss and noise, that’s a feature not a bug. It’s fuzz.