CARLSBRO

Come on: what other brand makes you feel the urge of ordering a pint ?
Still in business today, this glorious Albion brand had always been here and there in the music world since the '60s, time when their spelling was the ole Carlsborough.
Let's start with some 'Colorsound' Carlsbro, which differs from the Colorsound line by the fact they are almost the same.

And then this joyful 75w amp---which is really a 50w--made like a vintage Hiwatt.
I have heard the Velvet Underground used this particular type of amp, but no evidence.
Works very nice, tone, sturdy and everything.

 Their later tranny amp line was great too. Here is my cherished WASP, which bears the honorable badge of being the first amp on which my FUSEBLOWER was tested on. Very cool sounding amps, featuring premium Celestion speakers.

Ah, my alltime fave packaging ! Psychedelic design on metallic paper.
The 10 bands EQ must be good. I never tried it, and it's brand new.
I think its former owner bought it for the box too.

 But , while featuring the same enclosure than the EQ, this ADT is quite a different story.
This stressed piece of sheet metal is one of the most interesting pedal of my whole collection.
Some History:
The ADT or Artificial or Automatic Double Tracking was a prehistoric and complicated tube and tape device
invented by Ken Townsend for John Lennon confort, back at the time of the Beatles Abbey Road recording.
John was tired of singing and playing all tracks two times in order to get that rich natural chorusing tone of yore.
The solution found by Mr.Townsend was a huge valve-operated frequency controller coupled with a tape machine, operated by hand, that generated a identical signal that could be hand-delayed in order to get a great effect from ADT ( slight chorus) to slap back echo.
The name of this effect was then changed thanks to Peter Sellers, who was also recording at Abbey Road.
The word 'flange' was taken right out of one of his famous skeets.
This machine was overheating because it needed the copy tape to go very fast, so I can only suppose somebody at Carlsbro tried to find a more convenient solution when BBD chips went out.
I don't know if the original machinery is still on this earth, but it was still in duty during the recording of
Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon, according to David Gilmour himself.
My Carlsbro ADT really seems to have done pro duty if I can judge from its numerous mods that have been performed in the past.
I bought it in England.
Could it be part of Abbey Road studio arsenal ? Here is one of my source :
 

Slightly smaller than the ADT, here comes a great analog delay from the same era, in a more formal black aluminium attire and ruby light indicators. Classy.

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