A New Klon - In a Convenient Travel Size - Redux!

This isn't my first Klon build. This isn't even my first Tone Geek Mini-taur build. However, as I ended up selling my Tone Geek BFK (The Klone Wars) to my guitar teacher - and that was the only one I'd built with carbon resistors - I figured I needed a replacement (never mind I have at least two other functional Klon clones). I'd also ordered the parts in case my aforementioned guitar teacher needed something in a 125B form factor rather than the full-size Klon / Ceriatone. Since I have sort of a "mid tier" part and "high-end" part build, I tried to get as close to the early Klon configuration as I could for this one. One of these days I need to do a tone shoot out...

As you can see from the board above, most of the resistors are carbon film resistors. I tried to follow Ryan's circuit as closely as possible in terms of which resistors were carbon film, and which resistors were metal film. The only issue was I didn't have a 12K carbon resistor, so I had to substitute a metal film for it. If I do any more of this particular variant, I'll try to keep it faithful to the original as much as possible. I'm also using almost all Panasonic film capacitors as well. I had to use a modern MLCC for one of them (the 820pF) because I didn't have the Film version. For the diodes, I went with 1N34A germanium diodes with a forward voltage drop of ~0.35V as recommended by Ryan. I'd previously used D9E, but there's a lot of research indicating that the 1N34A is what was actually used. (Let the fight begin!) This one also includes the bi-polar electrolytic capacitors found in the early versions of the Klon circuit (the green ones). From that point it is just a simple matter of adding in the ICs.

When you buy the Mini-Taur PCB, you get a really cool Tone Geek faceplate for the enclosure. It's nothing hugely fancy, but I like it. I've used this for a couple of previous builds. One that I still have, and one that I gifted to a friend. For this one I decided to try some of the rubbed bronze knobs I'd used on the Brown Source build (as I have a lot of them). I sort of like the effect!

The other reason I went with the metallic knobs is I have a sort of anodized bronze colored enclosure for this build. Well, at least that's the color the spray paint is advertised as. I'm not sure I'm totally sold that it is an anodized bronze, but it sort of looks cool (though you can see some of the old red peeking through at the join). Since the board includes a faceplate, I recycled an enclosure for this particular build.

Sound wise... well, honestly it compares very favorably to the version with the extremely expensive components. At least through my Boss Katana. Once I get it hooked up to a decent tube amp, I may start hearing a difference between the two.

That being said, I'm actually pretty much ready to start offering limited production on these. I have another board ready to go and an enclosure on order from Tayda (nothing crazy, just a sand black one). I just need to finish calculating what they'd run in the various component configurations. This version is toward the low end, and honestly sounds great!