Catalinbread has now shrunk two vintage studio preamps into stompboxes in under a year. The 2025 Airstrip put a Trident A-Range console front end on a pedalboard for $179.99. The new Catalinbread Crooner does the same trick with a different, stranger source: the RCA BA-31, a solid-state microphone preamp that lived inside broadcast consoles in the mid 1960s. Same price, same idea, completely different voice.
That is the part worth slowing down on. Most “preamp in a box” pedals chase amplifier tones. Catalinbread keeps reaching backward into the recording chain instead, toward the modules that colored a signal before it ever hit an amp or a tape machine. The Crooner is the clearest sign yet that the company is building an actual series around that idea rather than shipping a one-off novelty.
What the RCA BA-31 actually was
The BA-31 was not a boutique guitar toy. It was a workhorse. Built around 1965, the early BA-31A used six germanium transistors and was one of RCA’s first solid-state mic preamp modules, designed to slot into broadcast and studio consoles as tube designs were being phased out. According to the collectors and restorers who still trade these units on Reverb and pull them apart on forums like GroupDIY, the original modules ran a fixed gain of roughly 40 dB with no volume control, fed by UTC and Foster input transformers, and were prized for a thick low end and a clarity that stayed musical even when pushed.
Two details from that spec sheet matter for what the pedal does. First, the germanium transistors and the output transformer are where the character lives. Germanium gain stages compress and soften differently than silicon, and a transformer adds its own saturation and low-end bloom when you drive it. Second, the BA-31 was a fixed-gain broadcast part. It was never meant to be overdriven the way a guitarist would want. Catalinbread’s whole move here is to take a circuit that was engineered to stay clean and give players a way to shove it far past its design limits.
How Catalinbread got a broadcast preamp to make fuzz
The Crooner runs four controls, and the interaction between two of them is the design.
Trim sets the gain of the RCA-inspired preamp circuit itself. Catalinbread is blunt about what happens here: because the original RCA preamp was never built for high internal gain, turning Trim up intentionally pushes the circuit beyond its intended operating range. That is where the clean broadcast tone starts breaking into compression, then grit, then a transformer-driven fuzz.
Push controls a separate UREI-inspired discrete op-amp stage feeding the preamp. At low settings it is a warm, mostly clean boost. Wind it up and it overloads the front end before the signal even reaches the RCA section. Catalinbread says that with both Push and Trim dimed, the pedal produces “molten lead tones packed with compression, harmonic richness, and vintage-style sag.”
Filter is the safety valve. It rolls off treble to keep things from getting harsh once you are running high Push and high Trim together, so the fuzziest settings stay usable rather than fizzy. Volume handles output.
Under the hood, the pedal runs internally at 18 volts (the original BA-31 used a 30-volt supply) off a standard 9-volt power supply, with no battery option. It keeps germanium components and an output transformer in the signal path, which is the whole reason it does not just sound like a generic clean boost. Catalinbread lists it in its Boost, Fuzz and Distortion series, backs it with a three-year warranty, and sells it direct for $179.99.
The Airstrip connection: a console-preamp series is forming
The Crooner follows the exact template Catalinbread set with the Airstrip in 2025. That pedal channeled the custom 1972 Trident A-Range console, the desk behind records by David Bowie, Elton John, and Queen. Same $179.99, same discrete-preamp premise, same small enclosure.
Put them side by side and the strategy is obvious. Rather than clone another amp or another famous overdrive, Catalinbread is working through the great recording consoles and broadcast modules one at a time, translating each one into a guitar-friendly gain pedal. The Airstrip is the polished British console sound. The Crooner is the American broadcast module with a darker, thicker, more transformer-heavy personality that breaks up in its own way.
If you have followed console-flavored pedals before, this territory is not brand new. The JHS Colour Box V2 built its reputation on Neve console preamp tones and became a studio-secret-weapon pedal for exactly that reason. What Catalinbread is doing differently is treating the concept as a line, not a single flagship, and pricing each entry under $180 instead of into JHS Colour Box territory.
Where a preamp pedal like this fits on a real board
The honest answer is that a pedal like the Crooner is most at home in one of two spots, and knowing which one you want changes how you buy it.
Run it low and clean, and it becomes an always-on tone shaper at the front of your chain, the kind of thing you set and forget to fatten up a thin single-coil or add weight to a direct-recorded signal. That is the studio use case, and it is why console preamps got famous in the first place.
Crank the Trim and Push, and it becomes a gain pedal, a boost that tips into overdrive and eventually a compressed, sagging fuzz. In that mode, placement matters more, and it is worth thinking about where drive and boost stages sit in your signal chain so the Crooner is doing the coloring you actually want rather than fighting whatever comes after it.
What it is not is a subtle, transparent boost you forget about. The germanium-and-transformer voicing is a flavor. If your rig already leans dark and thick, the Crooner may be too much of a good thing. If it leans bright and modern, this is a fast way to add vintage weight.
Is $179 the right number?
For a hand-built pedal with a genuinely distinct circuit and a three-year warranty, $179.99 lands in a fair spot, cheaper than the console-preamp pedals it competes with and squarely in the range where a curious player will take a chance. It is not the cheapest way to get grit; there are plenty of budget pedals that punch above their price if all you want is dirt. What the Crooner sells is a specific, hard-to-fake character: a 60-year-old broadcast module dragged well past the limits its RCA engineers ever intended.
Whether that is worth it depends entirely on whether “transformer-saturated RCA broadcast preamp” is a sound you have been missing. The more interesting story is the pattern. Two console preamps in under a year, both at the same accessible price, both built around parts most guitarists have never heard of. If Catalinbread keeps mining studio history at this pace, the next entry in the series is the one to watch.
Sources: Catalinbread, gearnews.com, Gear Gods, and Reverb and GroupDIY listings for original RCA BA-31 specifications.