A Guitar And Gear Support Forum

I ran across a mention of Lightning Boy brand "steel core instrument transformers". From the product description, they're 1:1 transformers that you're supposed to place between pedals "to give your pedals more of a vintage-studio-gear sound. The steel core laminations provide a bit of a retro sonic signature. You'll probably notice a little bit of an upper HF boost and a coloration of the mids. Both of these aspects become more obvious when the 2020S is driven by a boost pedal or when multiple 2020S's are in use in a signal chain."

Website (link broken to prevent backtracing of the link): https://lightningb oyaudio.com/2020s.html

Has anybody heard of anything like this before? I guess that a transformer could have some frequency- or phase-dependent effects, but stuff like "a retro sonic signature" and "coloration of the mids" sounds like pure snake oil.

To get low frequencies to pass through a transformer, you need lots of windings/high inductance/heavy wire/etc. That all means large size. What he is using is probably those $4 matching 1:1 transformer with a freq response of : ±3dB, 300Hz~3.4KHz. A bass cut sounds the same as a mid/treble boost. No way his are going down to 10hz as even the best $$$$$ home audio transformers don't go that low. $94 rip off. The $4 ones at Mouser are what people use when building isolating buffers and phase switching pedals.
https://www.mouser.com/Xicon/Passive-Co ... ?P=1z0zls8

There is actually a model used in the DIY Octavia pedal builds. Most common are the 600 ohm/600 ohm and the 10k/10k. Transformers will actually saturate with a large enough signal so maybe that's what he is calling vintage sound.