Hi Danny,
Wow, that one's a beauty. I like the slightly different shape compared to the later ones (22 frets instead of 24), the some kind of more edgy design of the early Reacters. I've only ever seen one like this on ebay late in 2009. I saved the images then.
I've taken a look at my preamps yesterday evening and here's what I found out.
Volume and Tone pots are 250k (220k) with log track taper.
The Blend pot is a stacked 250k with log track taper, too. Sorry I was wrong about it in my earlier reply.
Bass, Middle and Treble are all 10k with linear track taper, which makes perfectly sense, as you start in the middle and with a log track taper it would be about 80% on one side and 20% on the other. So you would get for example much more boost than cut.
In my opinion a different resistor for these pots should only change the efficiency of boost and cut, but I'm not dead sure about that... ;-)
I removed all the preamps from my basses (not from the Blen) and put them in stompbox cases, so I use the same preamp for every bass I plug in. Right now I have three of those with different preamps / different frequencies in them.
So that's the one with the Shadow preamp - removed from 1990 Reacter
That's one of the Citronic preamps - later board with changed frequencies
And that's how the Citronic preamp look like - original edition daughterboard.
So there was a motherboard with all the pots and switching on it apart from the blend control, which was later replaced with a rotary switch, and two daughterboard, as Chris used to call them. One was titled Standard Unit (600 hours of battery life and some noise) and the other one was called Low Noise Unit (150 hours of battery and low noise - by 1990ies standard). Citronic made these for Chris exlusively. The early daughterboards hat boost/cut frequencies at 60Hz, 300Hz and 2kHz, the later ones had frequencies changes to 60Hz, 600Hz and 4kHz. The writings on the boards never changed, but you can distinguish them from some parts.
And finally that's the one I've seen on ebay years ago.
So, if you ever think about letting her go, her younger siblings would be delighter to welcome her... ;-)
There might be some more information in Chris's stuff, but sadly he passed away early in August and therefore we can't ask him anymore.
I hope this helps and please let me know if I can do more help.
And now the final part:
A friend (he also owns a couple of Larkin guitars) and myself are working on a Chris Larkin owner / instrument database, that in the future should fill a website and maybe a book and therefore we are trying to collect as much information as possible.
So I'd like to ask if you'd join in, send us a couple of pictures, videos, soundfiles and whatever you have and know about your Larkin instrument. How you got it, any stories, whatsoever.
This is a non-profit thing and if there will be any money in the future it is to be donated into cancer research.
Cheers from Vienna
Christoph
