[ORAM]

This version was custom built for Roy Thomas Baker (RTB) who was an original Trident recording engineer with a discography to die for. (I mention that as some of the younger 'slutz may not know what incredible work he has done). He came to our place and discussed his requirements and I built this version for him. It has aluminium knobs to his specification, a meterbridge as standard and the original chipset used in my design of the 70s. One of the main sonic features of the Series 80 was its headroom and to get that as high as possible those early boards were powered with 20 volt rails. I worked with Texas Instruments at the time developing better audio chips. The Fleximix was my first board design and also one of the first boards to use op amps. At that time the 741 was the industry standard. I found they could batch select this product with a much higher slew rate. Called the 741S it made audio with opamps a realistic fact. In further discussions improvements were made that resulted in a J-Fet front end and more beefy output stage and the TL series was born. Trident had its own part number, but the rest of the world got the TL080 series (later TL070 lower noise selection).
Anyway, back to headroom: to be safe with the 20 volt rails the chips were supplied with 22 volt rail selection that was virtually MIL spec.
These are fitted in the RTB version and the headroom goes on for days, to quote one of our pro users!
Hope this makes sense and again, very well done in conducting your comparison tests and fielding some of the sideswipes.

JOHN ORAM