To celebrate Thermionic Cultures 11th anniversary, Thermionic Culture have announced the Culture Vulture Anniversary Limited Edition. The Anniversay model will be based on the companies current standard Culture Vulture but it has far more radical possibilities, in particular for guitar and bass applications. The production will be limited to 80 units and will have the front panel finished in Thermionic red instead of black.
MULLARD & PHILPS VALVES
The valves selected for the anniversary edition are Mullard and Philips NV, who owned 50% of Mullard. Mullard have a reputation for producing the best valves in the world and Thermionic have also specified the ‘M’ or military version, which was Mullard’s top grade model. The 2x input valves are Mullard M8100/CV4010, these are very high gain, low noise versions of the EF95, and provide better coupling for guitar and bass inputs with an even fatter warmer sound and were also used in the very first hand wired Vultures. The distortion valve is different too, another 2x Mullard’s, the M8196/CV4011 which is a low noise version of the 6AS6 distortion valve as used in the standard Culture Vulture. The last valve used is a single Philips ECG type 5963 double triode valve as the out put for both channel, this is a very high quality version of the American made ECC82.
10 POSITION DISTORTION TYPE SELECTER INC FILTERS
The distortion type selector switch now has 10 positions instead of the standard 3, the first two are triode and pentode as on the standard Vulture, with the next 5 all being Pentode that have been specifically designed with guitars and basses in mind by having a tuned filter optimized to musical notes. The final 3 positions are variations on the original Pentode 2 settings, SC1, SC2, SC3, ( squash! ) offers radical distortion effects like frequency doubling and over compression effects. As the overdrive section has an additional 4dB gain, an extra overdrive position has been added which halves the available overdrive gain. Thermionic Cultures product developer and beta tester Nick Terry, who came up with the idea for the original Culture Vulture and has recently engineered ‘The Klaxons’, ‘Franz Ferdinand’ and ‘Simian Mobile Disco’ said; “The new Squash setting are nothing like a traditional EQ, it’s extremely effective and brings guitars and basses to life in mixes like nothing else, I recently used it on an album project and it’s just become indispensable for me.” The intended price should be between the prices for the standard and mastering versions of the Culture Vultures.