Dinosaural Compressor OTC-201 Clone - With a Real Dino!

So this was another really fun build that may now be usurping some of my other compressor pedals as my favorite - at least for my single-coil guitars. That being said, my stock MXR Dyna Comp is still fairly amazing when I pull out my Les Paul. This build recreates a rare, though not ridiculously expensive ($300-$400-ish), compressor pedal - the Dinosaural OTC-201. Aion FX sells this as the Convex in both PCB and kit forms. I went ahead and picked mine up as a PCB as I wanted to hand pick some of the components and get as close to the original as possible.

As you can see, the PCB is a bit bigger than many of the Aion FX boards, meaning there is no room for a battery cable in a standard 125B enclosure. If you decide to go with a different enclosure you could, of course, make room for a battery if you so desire. I stuck with the standard 125B and will deal with the fact that it must always be plugged in. I've got a T-Rex fuel tank that has lots of amps for pedals on multiple channels, so that's not going to be a huge drawback for me. It is also one of the few Aion FX boards I've built so far that actually uses all of the connections coming out of the switch daughter board. Most only use one in the rightmost bank of three.

This pedal ended up being one of my more expensive builds (well, relatively speaking) because of a few boutique components required. First, as it is an optical compressor, it needs two Vactrols. I ended up using Xvive reissues of the original VTL5C4 models used in the actual pedal, each of which ran just shy of $8. I also used original BC549C (two at $1.25 each) and BC307B (two at $7.50 each) transistors rather than the 2N5088 and 2N3906 substitutes suggested by Aion. Because I went with the original transistors, I had to reverse them relative to the silkscreen because the emitter and collector are flipped relative to the flat side of the transistor on those models.

Which brings me to a handy little tool, the Peak Atlas DCA. The DCA analyzes everything from diodes to transistors, but in analyzing various transistors is where it really comes to the fore. Just attach the red, green, and blue leads (in any order, though I tend to try and go R-G-B where possible as this is what is displayed on the screen) to the transistor and it will identify the type, provide the gain, leakage current, and identify the base, emitter, and collector. This was important on this build as I had to reverse the transistors to ensure it was wired to the board properly

For the enclosure on this one, well, since this is a "Dinosaural" pedal and this is Steggo studios, I absolutely, positively couldn't resist. If you're not a teeturle fan, they have a great line of mostly geeky t-shirts from a variety of fandoms. They also have a great selection of tongue firmly in cheek dinosaur shirts and a game as well. As this is for personal use, I added their "Steggo" to the front in his natural disaster-laden habitat and just stuck with the "Dinosaural" name - as I'm starting to get enough pedals to where remembering what I've called them is getting daunting! I included a notation that this is an Aion Convex in the corner to keep everything above board! I picked up some cool knobs and anodized washers from Love My Switches to match the (sort of) twilight purple enclosure color.

In terms of sound, this is an amazing pedal, and I think it's probably going to find a near permanent home on my pedal board. It is a more modern design and I'm able to turn it up quite a bit without any hiss.