I had a Plush head and 2x15 back in the 70s. Basically a Dual Showman clone. You had to use short bottle 6L6's in it, because of the limited clearance on the head.
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Weird Amps Nobody Remembers
- Thread starter Pablo504
- Start date
After a couple of small Alamo amps, my first "real" amp was a kit by Southwest Technical Products Corp, aka 'SWTPC". It was their "MMM Instrument Amplifier" 60 watts, 2 channels, reverb & tremolo. I put it together and it didn't work - rats. I sent it back to them, and they fixed it - turned out I had installed every transistor BACKWARDS! Figured out later why I did that. The transistor markings on the board were little half moons, to match the shape of the transistors. Instead of lining them up to match, I had put them in so the flat side of the transistors faced flat side of the board markings (why!?!?). Anyway, once repaired (I think they charged me about half the price of the amp), it worked great. Awesome reverb is my main memory. Couldn't afford the matching speaker cab, so I built my own to match - huge cabinet (way too big) for with two 12" Radio Shack speakers (later replaced with 15s)covered with tolex, chrome corners, strap handles - I felt big time, then.
Yeah he was big on Akais, he had a small, could be battery powered one that was really more designed for ENG (electronic news gathering). He thought it was cool because it had a 15/16's per second speed mode. Also had 1 and 7/8's and the 3.75 IPS speeds.
He also had a Concord, which he sold soon after he got his first Akai but he had it for a while with the other Akais.
I still have the reel to reel he "settled" on and kept, I forget the model number but it was a great deck and he used it from 1970 to about 1980.
The COOLEST Akai he had though, had the reel to reel AND an 8 track recorder in the side. He had this interfaced with his system and you could take any source and run it into the reel to reel section or the 8 track section.
At the time he was really big on buying these pre-recorded reel tapes that were "American Airlines" tapes; they got played over the headphone systems on airliners.
He would take these tapes, put them on the Akai and make 8 track versions of them. Also he would take his Herb Alpert albums and run those into the 8 track as well.
So circa 1968 or so he had custom recorded 8 tracks for his car! Back then some people had standalone 8 track recorders but the vast majority of the market for 8 tracks were players (home and car) and pre-recorded tapes.
Needless to say my Dad was how I got into pro audio and studio stuff, especially analog decks. My first one was a used Teac A-1500 which I used as a mixdown deck in the studio our band had at college.
That got followed up by a Tascam Model 34 four track, then a TSR-8 eight track, then a MS-16 sixteen track. Oh yeah after that a BR-20T half track stereo deck I bought on a closeout deal for $1300 (list price at the time was $3500!). The BR-20T is a killer machine.
I love the sound and the smell of recording analog (tape just has a smell to it and I like that smell) but tape has gotten so expensive I am going to sell the MS-16. I have the TSR-8 as well but keep that around in case I want to revisit my old masters from that machine.
Will keep the BR-20T mixdown deck forever because when you mix a daw, through an analog console with outboard gear into that machine, it just kicks ass.
Analogeezer
These cabs?M
I remember standing in front of a Sunn Coliseum 880 stack (two folded horn cabs) and going DAMN I WANT THIS!
Analogeezer
I think the Chinese "Kustom" repros came in the late 90s or early 2000s, while Krossroad was more like early-to-mid 90s. Krossroad was all solid-state, the Chinese Kustoms were all tubes. Specs looked really good, but I heard they had reliability problems. Krossroad used the original style Naugahyde Zodiac coverings, whereas the new Kustoms used a much thinner material. Yeah, neither survived - too bad.
I have a Krossroad 500 2x10/1x15 rig in green, looks awesome. Sounds decent, not spectacular.
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When I started out, I remember Standels, Earth, Sunn, the early Acoustics, early SWR. The ones I look back nostalgically on are from the 80's, OG British-built Trace Eliott (an utter revelation in those days) and the P-Series Yamaha power amps: If Crown Royal would have made professional touring stereo power amps, it would have sounded like the P Yamahas. I forget the model, but I once test-drove the Trace rig with the stereo power head (AH600?) running two 410's sitting on top of two single 15's, all Trace bins. Wow!
An amp I never used but spent a lot of time around:
@agedhorse: Andy, you familiar with Webb amps out of Antioch, CA ? I had two brother-in-laws who were both pedal steel guys, and that's what they used. All SS, but the warmest 'no tubes!' amps I ever heard. Older design, theirs ran JBL's from those days, had LOTS of headroom, never heard the steel even begin to load one up.
Great amps.
An amp I never used but spent a lot of time around:
@agedhorse: Andy, you familiar with Webb amps out of Antioch, CA ? I had two brother-in-laws who were both pedal steel guys, and that's what they used. All SS, but the warmest 'no tubes!' amps I ever heard. Older design, theirs ran JBL's from those days, had LOTS of headroom, never heard the steel even begin to load one up.
Great amps.
Roland GB series? (not the Cubes) Dorky little low wattage combos and a big boy ~120w 1x15 combo that had a 'R&P' (Roland/Pioneer) speaker.
I used that ADA power amp with an ART NightBass preamp for a while in the 80s. Super cheesy effects.
EQ and compressor weren't too bad for the era though.
Their stuff ran the gamut. Some of it was pretty sub-par and some was excellent. Their test equipment, for the most part, was quite good. Some of it, like my tube tester and some (but not all) of the VTVMs and scopes, for instance, was very accurate and reliable. Along with companies like Eico and Dynaco/Dynakit, they were capable of making very high grade products but it all depended upon the price point they were meeting.
I built that one, too! In fact, I’d gutted my Heathkit TA-16 and installed the M/M/M in there! It was surprisingly good for a SS amp of that time.
I’m pretty sure that Pepco was the manufacturer of the Riviera 1x15 I mentioned earlier. It’s basically a flimsier copy of Fender cabinets of that time.
Honestly I wouldn't put it past them. It's a pretty cool cab you've got, I think.
The combos are definitely "like a Princeton, but made as cheap as possible." Still sounds good, it's even got an alnico speaker. Mellow and glassy. Def not for bass use.
It's always cool, IMO, seeing the oddities, like those $30 basses somebody was posting about I think this past weekend. Or those threads popping up about cool Soviet wallhangers or oldschool Japanese bass finds.
It came to me with a nameless 15 in it. It’s interior volume is very close to that of a TL606 so I put an EV driver in it, covered part of the slot port to tune it and it sounds nice driven with low power. My B15 gets along with it well.
At any kind of volume at all, though, everything goes sideways. The baffle is very thin and the construction is flimsy. I reinforced it within reason but driving it at gig volumes would surely shake it to pieces.
I had one for years. It's a great cabinet, sadly, with really no place to use it practically. I still own a 215 SH- the 2-15 version, same design.
Attachments
Spring 1977 I bought a used Peavey 300 series bass head used from the music store, ProCo in Kalamazoo. Store owner, Charlie Wicks, asked me, "Kid, what are you gonna hook that up to?" I had an 15" SRO and intended to build a cabinet in my high school's wood shop. "Come into my office." Charlie hands me the builder's plans for a TL-606, and told me to write EV and ask for all of their builder plans. I still have them and well worn. As for the Peavey amp, I promptly turned the amp around inside it's case so that the knobs were recessed relative to the case. My brother and I removed the "spectrum and mode" stage in the first channel of the preamp making it more like the second channel. In the nineties I traded it for a non-working Ampeg V4B. It sat on a shelf in my shop neglected until someone stole it. My brother gave me his Peavey 300 series amp three years ago. It worked, but when I opened up, the filter caps were leaking. For thirty bucks I could have put it back to functional. I dumped it instead.
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That doesn't surprise me, I think my combo is 1/4" ply and the joinery isn't bad but nothing more than adequate. If the head that cabinet was made for dished out anything more than twelve watts I'd be surprised. I know Pepco made a class a/b head that was actually pretty decent guitar material, but for the life of me can't find anything on them now.
