If you’ve ever taken the lid off a piece of Manley gear, you’ve no doubt seen our legendary hand-wound MANLEY IRON® transformers and possibly our newer MANLEY POWER® switch-mode power supplies. Those beefy custom transformers (wound in-house right here in California) and specially-designed low-noise universal voltage PSUs are both crucial ingredients in the sound of Manley equipment.

Recently, we’ve developed yet another piece of custom technology: MANLEY dLUX™.

The Manley ELOP®+, VOXBOX®, CORE®, and SLAM!® units all contain an electro-optical gain reduction circuit, which functions via the combination of an LED (light-emitting diode) and an LDR (light-dependent resistor). In brief, the LED emits light when gain reduction is required, and the LDR senses that light and resists commensurately, thus reducing the signal level.

Historically, off-the-shelf components were used to accomplish this task. Their inherent timing characteristics were what we desired in our units; however, their tolerances weren’t quite tight enough for our needs, so they required extensive time & energy to match & batch them for each unit – and then the specific components we used were discontinued, driving us to come up with a brand new solution.

So we created the MANLEY dLUX™ Module.

In 2021, we designed and produced our own modules using LEDs (Light Emitting Diodes) and LDRs (Light Dependent Resistors). They are flexible and mount into a 8-pin DIP socket and can be deployed in series or parallel as each module has two systems in the light-tight enclosure. From this we can replicate timing characteristics of the now obsolete VACTROL® VTL-5C2 and VTL-5C3 modules, upon which all of our electro-optical designs were based for the past 30 years. Importantly pre-batching and matching ensures excellent consistency and much tighter tolerances than one could buy off-the-shelf.

Like MANLEY IRON® and MANLEY POWER®, MANLEY dLUX™ has now joined the ranks of our other custom technologies to make our equipment perform at an even higher level.

Frequently Asked Questions

Q: Which Manley gear uses the new dLUX modules?
A: The dLUX modules are used in current production Manley ELOP+, VOXBOX, CORE, and SLAM! units.

Q: Can I upgrade my older Manley ELOP / VOXBOX / CORE / SLAM! with the new dLUX modules?
A: You are not required to, no. We already did the tedious work matching the original VACTROL modules in your unit. They don't wear out. They seem to last forever. They are working fine. Leave 'em alone.

Q: What does the name dLUX / ΔLUX mean?
In the mathematical world, the upper-case “delta” symbol (Δ) generally means “change”. And “lux” is the Latin word for “light”. Therefore, ΔLUX = “change in light”, representing the function of this component in an electro-optical gain reduction circuit.