| Author | Message | ||
     Tombo |
Best and most surprising amplifiers people have owned? Might lead to some reasonably priced hidden treasures to keep an eye out for, here are a few of mine: First real amp, and favorite, is black face Fender Bandmaster. Just had new caps installed and works fantastic with a variety of pedals. Loudest and cleanest is a Sound City 120 (it has six Amperex EL34s. Most surprising amp is a Sunn Stinger 60. A transistor amp that has smooth distortion and does not sound like a transistor amp. Made in the USA and cheap if you can find one. Another surprise, that I no longer own, was a Slivertone/Dan Electro case amp. It is a small tube amp that screamed when you ran a Big Muff through it. | ||
| Buellish |
'63 Brown face Blonde Bandmaster,'72 Deluxe Reverb,Seymore Duncan 100w Convertable and the most recent a Peavey Delta Blues.Unfortunately all gone now. | ||
| Court |
Dr. Z | ||
| Xb9er |
Greer Cam series from Greer Amplification. Hand made in Athens, GA. | ||
| Airbozo |
I acquired a 6 channel RANE amp many years ago and while not the best amp for a bass or guitar, the vocal clarity is amazing. | ||
| Rkc00 |
I have a Peavey Classic 50 and a Marshall MG100HDFX Guitar Amp Head and Half Stack   | ||
| Mnrider |
Whoa that guitar is taking me back to the 70's  | ||
| Al_lighton |
I've had a bunch of amps over the years, have sold most of them. I was big time into them years ago, history, circuits, mods, etc., but haven't done anything but play the ones I have since I've been running American Sport Bike. The ones I still have: 1968 Princeton Reverb   This is the amp I play the most. I'm not playing gigs any more, so it doesn't travel and I don't need a ton of power/volume for playing in the house. I've played through a number of Princetons, and some sound great, some not so much. This is a nice early silverface one that's up there with the best of them that I've played. It's bone stock other than the power cord. It has a whopping 12 watts. 1982 SuperChamp   These are cool little mostly tube amps that bridge the gap between the older pure tube fender amps and the modern hybrid amps. It still has most of the tone of the earlier amps, but is a little more compressed sounding. But it has a lead channel that's not half bad. It has a bit more power than the Princeton (18 watts). These have become fairly highly sought after over the years because they're so versatile, a so-called desert island amp. It's all stock except I added a pot to the back panel to add variable gain to the lead channel and had to build the pedal for it. 1970/71 Vibrolux Reverb     This amp was a really beat up silverface when I got it. But as ugly as it was, it sounded pretty good. Since it had no vintage value, I did a "restore" to an amp that never really existed. Fender never made a brown face Vibrolux Reverb (at least not in the early 60s...), but I liked the blond/oxblood grille look so I recreated the blackface control panel in brown and got all the necessary HW to complete the look. I re-did all the circuitry to blackface specs and re-routed a few wires. It really is a magic amp (even with the small taped over screwdriver hole in the speaker), one of the nicest sounding old fenders I've heard. I've played through a few of these vibroluxes, plus Supers, Pros, Vibroverbs, etc., and this one is up there with the best. It's really amazing how much variability there is from one to the next. If I was playing out, this is the one I'd use, but I rarely play through it in the house. It needs to be cranked a bit to sound good and it's just louder than I need most times. The vibroluxes were the lowest output of the Fender twin 6L6 amps (35 watt), so IMHO they sounded better when overdriven at sane volumes than the other 40 and 45 watt twin 6L6 amps. Years after I finished "restoring" it, Fender went and copied the damned thing! They released a tube/transistor hybrid amp that looks almost just like it, and have since released a whole series of brownface look-alikes. I don't have it any more, but I did something similar to an early Fender Silverface Super as well.    Same thing, it was pretty beat, so I did a brown face "restoration". But for that one, I went a bit nuts and re-wired it quite a bit. I put in a switchable cascade of channel one into channel two for a lead mode. If in "normal" channel 2 mode, it was just a basic blackfaced amp. It was a pretty decent sounding amp, but with 45 watts and 4 10" speakers, it was pretty darned loud, and REALLY heavy to haul, so I rarely played it and sold it. I had a Sovtek Mig50 (bassman psuedo-clone) around the same time that sounded pretty decent, but sold it for the same reason. It could make some serious noise, and they were a heckuva deal back then. I practically memorized the Gerald Weber (Kendrick) Desktop Reference of Hip Vintage Guitar Amps and Aspen Pittman (Groove tube) books back in the day. For those looking to get into tube amps and modifying them, I highly recommend those books and this one: http://www.londonpower.com/audio-design-books/TUT Al (Message edited by al_lighton on January 30, 2014) | ||
| Rkc00 |
Nice stuff Al. Just learning about amps. The book should come in handy. Much appreciated | ||
| Court |
One of my favorites is one of Erik's larger amps . . . the switch on the back panel is labeled: STANDBY STANDBACK | ||
| Stirz007 |
I have a Fender Dual Reverb and a Blues Jr, that I really like. I recently bought the Greta 2-tuber and it's pretty cool for what it is, plus you can use it as a pre-amp. | ||
| Hughlysses |
Here's a project I did a couple of years ago. The amp is a ~1964 Magnatone of about 5 watts. I bought it from a friend back in high school (about 1972) and it was my only amp for about 15 years (since I never got past the point of noodling on guitar at home). My son on the other hand is a monster guitarist, and I decided to fix this thing up for his graduation from the Atlanta Institute of Music a couple of years ago. The cabinet on this thing was cheap particle board and was beginning to crumble. Before:  I spent a lot of time looking at photos of boutique guitar amps with exotic wood cabinets. I decided I just wanted to copy the stock cabinet in nice wood. After searching about 12 hours (!) one weekend on the internet, I finally found a supplier on ebay that had 2 different kinds of wood in the thickness I needed with JUST enough to do the cabinet. The light colored wood is limba, better known to guitar lovers as "Korina" (a name for the wood trademarked by Gibson); the dark wood is wenge (pronounced wen-gay). Wenge has been used for fingerboards and necks on a lot of high end basses (Warwick for one). I'm really happy with how it turned out. The mixing of woods isn't so much a deliberate "design" as it was a way to "stretch" the wood I had to build the cabinet. Drawing for new cabinet in Sketchup:  In progress:  Completed:  Rear view:  The amp had always had a good bit of background hum. Fortunately, I found an extended post a guitar amp forum by a guy who had the same amp. He rewired his on the "star" grounding system and I did the same. I also recapped it and replaced one suspect tube. The speaker is the original 4 inch Jensen. The other major electronic mod was to add an isolation transformer to the power cord. When I was in college, I lived in a dorm room with metal walls and if you had the power cord to this thing plugged in the wrong way touched a wall while holding a guitar, it would light you up (DAMHIK). The amp's only got 2 controls: volume and tremolo. It's quiet as a mouse now, has a clean tone at low volumes, and great distortion at "high" (a relative term with this amp) volume, especially with some sort of booster box in line. (Message edited by Hughlysses on February 02, 2014) | ||
| Al_lighton |
I love it, Hugh. It's a beauty. great job. Al | ||
| Steveford |
My old Ampeg Gemini II was a pretty good amp, the Ampeg VT-22 (I think it was) was louder but I'm not sure was any better, the Marshall 100W stack I bought in the 70s was just tremendous, a Marshall 100W bass head with a 4-12 cabinet worked well, the Marshall Mini Stack (transistor) was a piece of crap, a 100W brown Marshall transistor head was versatile but weird sounding and I currently own a Marshall JCM2000 head with a 4-12 angled cabinet. That's certainly overkill for my house! | ||
| Kilroy |
my 70' Fender Twin Reverb was unbeatable | ||
| Xdigitalx |
Ampeg PF-500 bass head 500W, I like the sound (and weight) of this head,... going to pick up the matching 15"+ horn ampeg cabinet for mobile (and to save my back) but definitely still keeping the SWR.  | ||
| Xdigitalx |
Also Have a Fender Hotrod Deluxe, its not vintage but gets the job done. | ||
| Hughlysses |
^ Nice rig, Mike. | ||
| Trojan |
Not a performance amp but a great little home/practice amplifier is the Yamaha THR10. Has a few built in effects and an input for I-Pod/MP3 etc so you can play along. Best thing is it looks like a small radio and not a guitar amp, so the mrs doesn't complain too much  http://www.guitarworld.com/review-yamaha-thr10-mod eling-and-recording-amp |
