New Amp Day...!!!

miroslav

Cosmic Cowboy
So in all the commotion of the day...I completely forgot to mention the new amp that showed up at my door. :)

I scored a Fender '57 Custom Twin Amp. :cool:
This is not the high-powered Twin...but the 40W Tweed, which has been called by many "one of the best amps ever made"...but that's subjective of course, though it certainly is a model that embodies much of the vintage Rock tone, and one of the amps that influenced the birth of the Marshall sounds, though the '57 doesn't sound anything like a Marshall, but you can hear underneath its tone how it influenced those later amp generations.

This is an all Point-to-Point hand wired amp, sporting some vintage designed caps and wiring, staying pretty true to the original, and it has a pair of 6L6 power tubes with dual 5U4GB rectifiers. A pair of 12AY7 tubes in V1 & V2 and then a pair of 12AX7 tubes in V3 & V4.

There are a pair of 12 Weber designed/Eminence built 8ohm Alnico speakers, wired in parallel and running at a combined 4 ohms.
There's the 1-2 Bright and 1-2 Normal channels, each with their own Volume control and there are Presence, Treble and Bass controls.
Unlike some other Tweed amps, because of its design, you can't jumper the Bright/Normal channels, but you can use a guitar Y cord and feed both at the same time for combination tones. You can also pull one rectifier tube for more sag.
The cabinet is a lacquered tweed.

I got it for just a bit over 1/2 price because it had a ding on one of the corners, and some minor handling smudges, and the amp doesn't appear to have been played at all. Well, the smudges all wiped off with a wet rag, and the corner ding is 100% fixable like it was never there.
So the smudges and the ding saved me $1400 off the total price, on a virtually new amp! :p

Anyway...this thing sounds absolutely marvelous!
I plugged a Tele into it and it was the most perfect marriage of guitar and amp I've heard in awhile! Here's a pic of the amp.

57CustomTwinAmp.jpg
 
40watt Twin...I like that idea..and pulling a tube for more sag sounds interesting.
Im with you on the $1400 savings, for a ding or too, no problem.

congrats..
 
The combination of eminance and 6L6's is just pure cream to me.

And add to that a Tele, and man, I was in tone heaven last night.
I've never heard a Tele sound so good with any other amp like it did with this '57 Custom Twin Amp.
I've got a 5E3 Tweed Deluxe clone, one of the better clones out there, from Tungsten Amps...and while it's a great sounding amp, it doesn't marry up as well with the Tele like the '57 did...or I might just be somewhat new-amp-biased... :)...but I think it's the combination of the dual rectifiers, the dual Eminance Alnicp speakers and the bigger cabinet of the '57, so the sound is just very spacious and 3D.
The 5E3 is more direct, and it does also have more grittier growl when pushed...it does that Neil Young "rust" thing to a T! :D
 
5E3 is s small amp,, the Twin is a big amp. Makes all the difference in the world. That bigger pine caninet resonating has a lot to do with it too.
 
So in all the commotion of the day...I completely forgot to mention the new amp that showed up at my door. :)

I scored a Fender '57 Custom Twin Amp. :cool:
This is not the high-powered Twin...but the 40W Tweed, which has been called by many "one of the best amps ever made"...but that's subjective of course, though it certainly is a model that embodies much of the vintage Rock tone, and one of the amps that influenced the birth of the Marshall sounds, though the '57 doesn't sound anything like a Marshall, but you can hear underneath its tone how it influenced those later amp generations.

This is an all Point-to-Point hand wired amp, sporting some vintage designed caps and wiring, staying pretty true to the original, and it has a pair of 6L6 power tubes with dual 5U4GB rectifiers. A pair of 12AY7 tubes in V1 & V2 and then a pair of 12AX7 tubes in V3 & V4.

There are a pair of 12 Weber designed/Eminence built 8ohm Alnico speakers, wired in parallel and running at a combined 4 ohms.
There's the 1-2 Bright and 1-2 Normal channels, each with their own Volume control and there are Presence, Treble and Bass controls.
Unlike some other Tweed amps, because of its design, you can't jumper the Bright/Normal channels, but you can use a guitar Y cord and feed both at the same time for combination tones. You can also pull one rectifier tube for more sag.
The cabinet is a lacquered tweed.

I got it for just a bit over 1/2 price because it had a ding on one of the corners, and some minor handling smudges, and the amp doesn't appear to have been played at all. Well, the smudges all wiped off with a wet rag, and the corner ding is 100% fixable like it was never there.
So the smudges and the ding saved me $1400 off the total price, on a virtually new amp! :p

Anyway...this thing sounds absolutely marvelous!
I plugged a Tele into it and it was the most perfect marriage of guitar and amp I've heard in awhile! Here's a pic of the amp.

View attachment 104433


Lucky you.

Have fun with your new toy.

And I agree that better is subjective. Spending more money does not guarantee better.

---------- Update ----------

Yeah! Great amps. Enjoy. ; )


But is it really better??? Or just different?
Jk
:D

Just different. Better , whatever that really is, is all subjective.
 
Not sure yet which... but I guess you'll want some kind of proof either way. :D

If only proof of such a concept were even possible. Logic says you cannot prove better at all. At least if there is more than one parameter that might influence the result.
 
If only proof of such a concept were even possible. Logic says you cannot prove better at all. At least if there is more than one parameter that might influence the result.

Go eat another bag of **** man. You obviously have plenty to spare.

I find you kind of funny in a humorous way, but it is getting old.

Tic toc....
 
Go eat another bag of **** man. You obviously have plenty to spare.

I find you kind of funny in a humorous way, but it is getting old.

Tic toc....

Sorry you think that logic and facts are a bag of **** , man.

This whole forum is so full of **** as you put it that there will be bumper crops this year.
 
Last year I did the Sweetwater amp build. A 5E3 combo, by Mojotone. Purists would say it wasn't an amp build, but a paint by colors gig. Either way, I'm comfortable using a soldering iron and I found the 2-day build demanding, but do-able. I would not have done well at home with a kit, and would stand no chance building from scratch from a schematic. This level was perfect for my skill set.

Talk about new amp day pride! When that thing fired up and sounded great, I couldn't get the smile of my face if I tried.

New amp days are great. Enjoy yours!
 
  • Like
Reactions: RFR
any chance you could dial it down a bit?

I think he's been dialed down to zero....finally.
"Nothing is better, it's all just different" ...was getting pretty tiresome. :rolleyes:

Sure, there's always the subjective view on some things...but there is also a very analytical side, especially with audio, that most definitely has a "better" component to it, and not just all "different".

Is a Telecaster "better" than a Stratocaster...? You can't really have a definitive analytical answer.
Is a Custom Shop Telecaster better than a $150 Chinese knockoff...mmm, yes, it probably is on many levels.
You might be able to use the knockoff to get some tones that "to you" are useable enough, but, most likely quality is not better, the electronics are not better and so the final tones may also not be better, because there might be some additional harshness because of the cheaper electronic components...etc.
That's why very often people will strip down a cheaper knockoff and install better hardware and electronics to make it...better.

That's just guitars, which are pretty straightforward pieces of gear.
When you get to preamps and equalizers and comps...etc...etc...the higher-end stuff will usually have less distortion, greater signal-to-noise, and generally higher quality components which all go to yield more cleaner and richer audio. Now someone might prefer the sound of the added distortion and noise, and might argue that the two are just "different"...but that's not the greater consensus in the audio/recording world...so then that person is just living in denial.
Sure, there could be a case where you want the crappier audio for some "effect" or specific "lo-fi" thing...but that's not the usual choice, and 9 out of 10 times most people will reach for the gear that yields the better quality signal.

So with the amps...the 5E3 amps are great. I love mine. They have some serious personality and identifiable tones, for sure...but like RFR said, a smaller amp/cab just won't be the same as the bigger sound of a 212 setup.
So in this case...they are just different. :)
 
In audio there seems to be science - which is objective and comparable in isolation, and then there's everything else.

From time to time, some little gems pop along. A long time ago, Sound on Sound magazine in the UK found this eastern block mic manufacturer called Oktava, or actually many similar names because nobody really worked out the Russian to English thing very well. They'd been making mics that were so ugly that they looked kind of like the Daleks designed them. The MK209 was two halves of cast aluminium and they nearly matched when screwed together. People in the magazine wrote in (not emailed) to say it was worth filing them to make them less likely to cut your hands. However - horrible though they looked, they sounded really nice. Then the 309 came out looking better, but still kind of industrial with a crinkly baked on enamel paint. I bought two - still got them and use them. I bought a few Chinese made by hand mics when Alibaba first appeared and most were just 'OK', but one factory sent me some that were great, and I bought (and sold) quite a few - until they stopped making microphones and started making lighting when they lost their sound engineer who produced them. Equally I have bought so many below average products that I've come to believe that it's mostly luck. The guy who designed the mics I liked also asked if I would be interested in a copy of the old AKG 451 series - omni, hyper and cardioid screw on capsules. They even copied the crazy fine thread AKG used and they were magic mics, but again - after buying 50, they suddenly stopped.

My point is simple. Cheap products mainly from china in our field are now better than they ever have been. A cheap mic in the 70s meant I started on Eagle products - made in Japan. Cheap and pretty average by today's standards. The jump from this to a Shure 57, my first 'real' mic was shocking. A totally different and better sound. Now, the differences are smaller. A £30 Chinese Ebay condenser really isn't a rubbish microphone by any standard related to it's price. So many Youtube videos clearly benefit from these over the nasty sound cheap cameras seem to have. If you spend more money, then on paper, often not much changes. We spend hours on here extolling the virtues of preamp X over preamp Y, and talking about a few extra dB of noise performance, but the reality is that we plug them in, set a gain somewhere in the middle and they do a decent job. Is this difference measurable? Yes. Audible? Jury is out. When you have just dropped a grand on a product of course it's going to be better, but I still find I go back to my old favourites. I'm untidy, and I never put things away, apart from the very expensive stuff. So when I need a quick chunk of saxophone for a project and there is an AT2020 on the stand ready, or I could walk into the store and get the little flint case out with a 414 in it, do I bother? No - most times the 2020 is perfectly good enough for that little sax break in the middle 8 that lasts four bars.

If money was no object, I have a great shopping list in my head - but in the real world, I still buy random stuff and get surprised. Rarely burned.
 
If money was no object, I have a great shopping list in my head - but in the real world, I still buy random stuff and get surprised. Rarely burned.

Yeah, I've got a lot of random stuff too...picked up when I wasn't really looking to spend a lot, and I figured I meant as well give it a try.
A week ago I went to pick up a gear isolation box from this guy...it's the 20-space IsoBox made by Sound Construction & Supply (what a big Mofo!), he had it left over from a former studio, and the price was right. :)
So while there, he breaks out this "homemade" tube preamp, with a big Hammond tranny, and some interesting tonal shaping options. He says that an old electronics engineer guy built it...they were prototyping out a possible formal build. It looks pretty good for "homemade"...no case, kinda like a small guitar amp chassis without the cabinet.
So he says for another $150 he'll throw it in with the IsoBox...and goes and grabs a mic so we could try it. Now he's got some Manely gear, some big ass tube mics, and a few other upscale items that he was still keeping, but I figure he must know the differences in quality and sound...so how bad can this homemade tube preamp be...?
Well...the preamp came home with me. It surprised me that it sounded that good...but then it was built with quality parts, it just had that homemade look.

So yeah...you can be surprised by a lot of "no-name" gear, for sure.
That said...in my younger days, and through my studio evolutions, the ultimate "guide" for me as to what's good, what is guaranteed to work can be trusted to at least "help" get you closer to the sound of commercial quality productions without as much effort...has always been to look at what the pros are using.
Years of audio gear subscriptions (before the internet boom) and lots of reading about stuff in hardcopy, and also later on the net.
I couldn't always get all the gear I read about, but yeah, if money was no object, I've had long shopping list in my head for a long time!
Of course...as I got older, I was able to afford more of the things I wanted off that list, though still, I love a good deal and a good gear surprise! :)
 
40watt Twin...I like that idea..and pulling a tube for more sag sounds interesting.
Im with you on the $1400 savings, for a ding or too, no problem.

congrats..

Err, was running on just one recifier valve suggested in the manual or is this just hearsay?

Thermionic rectifiers are feeble fekkin' things at the best of times and lumping ALL the load on just one if the amp was designed to use two in parallel could lead to early failure and fuse blowing. Possibly a mains traff burnout although that is unlikely.

Generally chaps DON'T ***ck with valve amps unless you REALLY know what you are doing and/or have deep pockets.

Dave.
 
Back
Top