The Thermionic Culture Snow Petrel is a two-channel microphone amplifier. The name is the tie-break winner of a Sound on Sound competition to name the newest Thermionic Culture product, and was chosen because it conjures up images of a warm bird above an icy landscape in Antarctica (valves vs. solid state).
 
Unveil the beauty of your favorite ribbon microphones in the most natural way, revealing sparkling clear highs down to harmonically rich lows. Designed originally for use with the Coles 4038 as a super-clean low noise unit, after extensive field tests in UK, Norway and France, we’ve found it sounds exceptional with ANY microphone including the classic Neumann U 87.
 
Thermionic Culture employ extra-low noise valves with no solid state impurities in the audio path, plus very special Sowter input and output transformers. The input impedance is higher than usual to preserve clarity and can be tailored to individual mics with the Hi/Lo and Pad switches.
 
The Snow Petrel features incredibly musical and progressive saturation for distortion lovers when overdriven and by employing the fine and coarse attenuators.Controls include Gain, from 40 to 75 dB, switched, HPF to reduce “proximity effect” and “Air” to add that extra clarity.Thermionic Culture products are carefully hand made and tested in Harlow, England.
 
The Features
- Extra-low noise valves with no solid state impurities in the audio path
- Sowter's VERY special balancing transformers for the inputs and outputs
- Higher than usual input impedance to preserve clarity
- Hi/Lo Pad switches to tailor the input impedance to suit individual mics
- +48 V Phantom power available
- All valve Class A amplification
- Controls include Switched Gain, from 40 to 75 dB; HPF to reduce 'proximity effect' and 'Air' to add that extra clarity
- Housed in a 2U 19" rack-mounted unit