Thermionic Culture The Phoenix (Mastering Plus)

Controls: Elma switches for Gain & Threshold, Alpha switches for Attack & Release, Omeg indented Output Level pots, Side Chain Bass Cut, Stereo Link, Standby switch, Bypass per channel, front-panel meter-zero trims

I/O: Balanced ins/outs via custom Sowter transformers

Notes: MOL +19dB into 600Ω / +24dB into 10kΩ; Max gain 30dB; THD (no compression) better than 0.06% @100Hz/1kHz; Attack 0.004s–0.12s, Release 0.04s–2.4s; Noise better than 100dB below MOL (IEC). Valve complement: 2x PCC85 (input/compression), 2x ECC81 (output), 2x EB91 (side-chain detector). Country confirmed via feature text 'point to point hand wired in England.' Phoenix compressor lineage introduced 1998; Master Phoenix variant introduced Oct 2006; this Mastering Plus is a later upgrade of unstated exact intro year — year_intro left blank rather than guessed. Official site thermionicculture.com is currently unreachable/broken (root returns an empty Apache directory listing, product URLs 404) as of research date 2026-07-19; all data below sourced from Wayback Machine snapshot dated 2025-05-16 (and linked official spec-sheet PDFs) of the live Joomla/VirtueMart catalog, cross-checked against the current Independent Audio (US distributor) product listing, which also shows no USD pricing.