Current lover

[Locrian99]

Curious which version of the electric mistress current lover is closest to

[lars]

I believe it's closest relative is the EH-5101 version, better known as the "V6 9volt" from 1981.
In my personal experience with the Electric Mistress circuit, the typical booster that gets tacked onto the end of the circuit of every clone I've seen is a poor choice to overcome the volume drop issue people complain about. The booster increases the sound, but it also increases the BBD noise, since it comes AFTER the BBD. I also feel it alters the "electric mistress tone", which can only be fully achieved when you leave the circuit after the BBD alone.
A much better solution to increase the gain is to boost the clean signal level BEFORE the BBD, which is exactly what was done in the 1999 Deluxe version. By simply adding the 3.6k, 10k resistors and 1uf cap seen off pin 2 and 6 of IC1a here:  clean boost in place of the straight connection between pin 6 and pin 2 off IC1a of the Current Lover schematic, you get a massive amount of clean boost! You'll probably have to put a trimmer in for the 10k resistor because it seriously bumps up the output of the circuit without adding BBD noise. (It works almost exactly like the resistor/cap combo off the cathode of a valve, which you can adjust the gain). With that modification, the entire circuit after R19 on the Current Lover schematic becomes unnecessary. R19 would be your output point, just like the original Electric Mistress, and to my ears, just sounds more correcter