Dear Audio Professional,
Thank you for purchasing the Creamliner. We hope it will deliver exceptional performance for many years into the future.
Please take the time to read this manual. It describes Creamliner’s design philosophy as well as its most important functions.
DESIGN PHILOSOPHY
Our intention behind the Creamliner was to create a unique device, to the moment unavailable on the market, that could favorably change the
sound of music mixed or produced with digital audio gear.
Since the inception of digital audio, Recording Engineers have been commenting on its lack of warmth and weight. It always left something to
be desired. Many plugins have been designed to remedy this condition, but none has been 100% effective.
We hope that Creamliner will change all that. It can be inserted into the mixing or mastering chain during a live performance or a studio
session to “glue” those nasty digital artifacts and impart warmth and softness to the mix.
To achieve this, the Creamliner uses a pentode, an input and an output transformer. The latter can be bypassed and replaced with a solid
state balanced driver. The pentode tube has a purpose to impart pleasant even-order harmonics to the sound, while the transformers tame
down the fast digital overshoots and thereby yield “warmth” to the sound.
An EF86 pentode operating in class A is Creamliner’s only active gain stage. It can be configured to work in either triode or pentode mode.
Bypassing cathode selectively using inductors and capacitors yields a subtle, but very musical tone control.
This circuit exhibits a certain non-linearity (coloration); the harmonic distortion may exceed 1% before the actual clipping occurs.
To preserve it, we purposely refrained from using transformer tap negative feedback, found in many circuits. Instead, the tube stage is
followed by a solid-state buffer and the output level control. Finally, a modern discrete transistor complementary buffer with extremely
low distortion is used to drive the output transformer and the load.
The standard output transformer has 100% Fe cores. This, along with a switchable solid- state balanced output, gives the final tone coloring.
