Yup, I did that in 1974. It was an amazing sounding amplifier. All tube, tape delay, 30/300 Watts, amp modeling, and a ton of other innovative features (at the time). Jeff Baxter was not consulting on it, but he was an investor. Even today, I suspect it would blow away most of the world class tube amps now available.
Oh what a fuckin' deal.
It's far from a nightmare to keep it running - and yes, it's a great sounding amp. I can't begin to list all the innovations it had, but it was a real workhorse that'll probably keep working for another 36 years.Oh what a fuckin' deal.
Seriously now. Would this be a good buy from a sound standpoint or a fuckin' nightmare if you actually wanted to use it? Onboard tape delay? At this late date is this something more for the collector than the musician?
lou
It used standard 8 track tapes, but run at high speed for higher fidelity. The two ohm idea was a way to get around the rise in impedance near speaker resonance, which reduces the power output considerably. The design used two cabinets; one open back, with four 8-Ohm 12's, wired in parallel to produce a nominal 2 Ohm load (in an open back cabinet).
Coooool !.! My only question to you Harvey is: Do you own one?
Actually, that's quite an ingenious solution irrespective of the time.
Sadly, no, I don't own one. Actually, I have very few of the products I've designed over the years. And of those, I've had to buy most of them off ebay, Craigslist, or pawnshop finds.
At the time, the 33JV6's were very common, cheap, and used in most tube TV sets as Horizontal Output amplifiers. Other than finding those, and 8-track tape cartridges, there is very damn little that can go wrong with that amp. I think it wasn't repaired, but rather went through a normal health check cycle, i.e., pot cleaning, checking caps, etc.