Author: Stewart - Page 11 - Valve Tube Guitar Amps

A Memory-Filled Journey Into The Life Of Guitar Legend Leo Fender

A Memory-Filled Journey Into The Life Of Guitar Legend Leo Fender The world occasionally produces one of those rare thinkers whose name becomes iconic. Thomas Edison lit up the world; Albert Einstein profoundly altered the study of physics; Walt Disney reimagined entertainment; and Leo Fender perfected the electric guitar. Fender grew up in Fullerton, California, where his interest in electronics lead him to open his own radio repair shop in 1938. It wasn’t long before […]

A Memory-Filled Journey Into The Life Of Guitar Legend Leo Fender Read More »

Valve Suppliers and Resellers, make sure you know the market

Valve Suppliers and Resellers (see note) When your amp needs new valves no doubt you will read the reviews of all the differing manufacturers of amplifier valves and what they have to offer. It appears that there are loads of different manufacturers but in fact there are only three main manufacturers on the planet. There are a few other specialists but they make so few and mostly for high end HiFi. The companies that own

Valve Suppliers and Resellers, make sure you know the market Read More »

Phase Splitter Valves they do influence your amp tone

The phase splitter valve while it is a pre-amp type valve is really not part of the pre-amp chain at all. It is actually part of the output stage. When an amp has two or more valves then it operates in a mode called push pull. Its job is to invert the signal so that one of your two output valves is driven at any one time. This is a an oversimplified description but I

Phase Splitter Valves they do influence your amp tone Read More »

Ampeg B200R a Sad Tale…maybe you can advise us?

We were asked to have a look at an Ampeg B200R bass amp. This is a Chinese built amp and is known to have a few challenges. Faults include badly fitting chassis in the case resulting in the chassis being damaged and known to fail when the speaker is switched from ” no horns” to “horns” jack socket. This failure mode is caused by the panel which is mounted in the chassis with the speaker

Ampeg B200R a Sad Tale…maybe you can advise us? Read More »

Unexpected Valve wear in an Orange Rockerverb 50 MkIII

Over the weekend I had the pleasure of doing a quick service on and Orange Rockerverb MkIII. The amp is just coming up on two years old and gigged at least every week. The owner reported that the amp was creating murky distortion and it sounded so horrible it was no longer useable. So this amp is experiencing a lot of lugging around and used at giigs lasting 3 hours or more. He was leaving

Unexpected Valve wear in an Orange Rockerverb 50 MkIII Read More »

The Howl and the Hum fixing four Fender amps in one day

Its a couple of weeks since I wrote about fixing amps and I had not seen a Fender amp to fix for a few weeks and then along comes four all on the same day ! In the cover picture we proudly present four broken amps -At the Top a Fender Blues Jr III -Underneath is a Fender Supersonic 40 watter -to the left is a Princeton Reverb re-issue -to the right is a Hot

The Howl and the Hum fixing four Fender amps in one day Read More »

Ashdown Evo II 300

This is essentially a solid state amp so before I get shot down in flames, my defence is that there is one valve in this amp which is there to warm up the sound. This Ashdown Evo II 300 is a 300 watt amp with twin 12 inch speakers. It is very well constructed with great access to the key parts of the amp This Ashdown Evo II 300 was distorting and sounded terrible. When

Ashdown Evo II 300 Read More »