Grateful Dead Music Forum

Congrats Brad and I look forward to owning one hopefully in the not too distant future. Looks like fuzz pedals and often overdrive pedals are recommended in front of the black box - do you recommend any other pedals go in front? thanks

Good point. In general it's best to have it first so the pickups can "see" the tube directly and get all that goodness. But it's true that a Fuzz pedal, I mean a real Fuzz pedal like a Fuzz Face type, should go first because when they're on, they truly need to see both the pickup and the volume pot. That's the primary exception. True Fuzz pedals don't really work well if they see a buffered signal. So ideally in that case, a Fuzz pedal would go first, and it would also have a true bypass switch so that when it's off, the pickup again sees the tube directly. But really, there aren't a lot of rules. Some may find that the Black Box sounds cool after distortion pedals but before modulation and reverb/delay pedals. By doing this, the tube gets to warm over the distortion overtones from the pedals before it passes on to other effects. No harm in trying any combination. But generally, there's real magic when a pickup sees a tube.


Brad

Congrats on your lastest success, Brad.

Are there any currently built (i.e., new stock) rack-mounted power amps that you believe match up well with your Garcia-style preamp?

Jon S. wrote:Congrats on your lastest success, Brad.

Are there any currently built (i.e., new stock) rack-mounted power amps that you believe match up well with your Garcia-style preamp?

Regarding solid state power amps, I'm really not sure at the moment what new ones handle clipping and peak power transients well. Pretty much all solid state (non Mosfet) power amps have nearly the identical peak protection limiter as the McIntosh with Sentry Monitor amps do. It's called a VI Limiter and since the '70s has been pretty much a standard thing. McIntosh's however also have the output "autoformer" which seems to do something nice to the distortion artifacts resulting from overdriven transistors and the peak limiter action. What's important in a power amp going for the Jerry thing is that when you clip it and cause it to briefly distort on the peaks, that it do it in a fairly musical fashion. So I'm hoping a number of people can offer some feedback on the issue. It's quite possible that there are other power amps that will do this adequately and without frying themselves. The McIntosh amps are just extremely rugged and seem to be perfectly happy operated in this peak power range.

Mosfet amp's are a consideration because MOSFET output "transistors" have a musical, more tube-like way of clipping when driven to the max. The older Mosvalve amps sound nice. Hafler has made a number of great sounging MOSFET amps over the years too.

I guess one of my current recommendations is to pair the SMS preamp with a clean, high-headroom tube power amp. These amps will nicely deliver the super clean tube preamp signal and obviously being power tubes, the peaks will always be nicely musical sounding. On the high end, Fryette (formerly VHT) makes a great one. Boogie has a couple of models that have been around. And on the most affordable end of the spectrum, Carvin makes a decent one that can be set up with 6L6 power tubes. I've heard some good reports about the Carvin, but I can't personally vouch for that. I think even Peavey made a decent rack mounted tube power amp that may be worth consideration. Some of these high power tube amps use EL34 tubes. While those make a great, hi-fi clean sound and a nice Marshall type crunch when driven, that's probably not the power tube we here are after. For the Dead and Jerry type tones, we should consider 6L6 and the KT88 type power tubes. Those are the tubes that when clipping, still retain a clean character. Very Jerry.

Brad

Thanks, Brad.

Is this the Carvin you mean? Carvin's web site says it can use 4 EL34s, 4 6L6s, or 2 and 2 (great tone - the Egnater Renegade also mixes EL34s and 6L6s and the one I heard sounds glorious) for 100W:

http://www.carvinguitars.com/products/s ... duct=TS100

From the input jacks to the speaker outputs, the TS100 stereo amplifier incorporates an all-tube signal path. deliver 50 Watts per channel or 100 Watts bridged. Each channel can even be independently biased to use EL34, 6L6 (included), or 5881 output tube types. Because the TS100 is so true to its all tube design and performance, it also makes an ideal high power audiophile home entertainment tube power amplifier.

In contrast, this one is SS and 200W:

http://www.carvinguitars.com/products/s ... ct=DCM200L

Yes,

that's the Carvin tube amp I was talking about. My gut feeling about that amp is that it would probably be really good sounding, and even better if you get in there and REALLY set the bias. I'm sure they are safe and conservative so that you can put in any set of 6L6's or 5881's. But as with any tube power amp, you want to truly tweak the bias for the particular tubes that are in it.

Brad

Brad, I still use an old TubeWorks 1160 poweramp and agree how musical it is at high volumes.

Peavey was not as good, IMO. They used DDT clipping technology which to my ears was kind of a limiter.

Plus the knobs on front were input level vs. volume which was less than ideal in regards to getting proper sound.

Yeah,

the Tubeworks amps always sounded kind of sweet. The pedal steel players like them.

Peavey's DDT circuit is most definitely a limiter circuit. I really haven't messed with it much for our purposes. The Peavey I was referring to was one of their stereo tube power amps. I don't know if that one had the DDT, but I'd guess it didn't because the tube's naturally limit and clip.


Brad

SarnoMusicSolutions wrote:Yes,

that's the Carvin tube amp I was talking about. My gut feeling about that amp is that it would probably be really good sounding, and even better if you get in there and REALLY set the bias. I'm sure they are safe and conservative so that you can put in any set of 6L6's or 5881's. But as with any tube power amp, you want to truly tweak the bias for the particular tubes that are in it.

Brad

Thanks. I'm going to move, soon, in a different direction amp-wise. I'll definitely consider your Garcia-style preamp paired with the Carvin unit with 6L6s in one channel, EL34s in the other channel, and the two channels bridged for performances. (I may have mentioned this earlier but I tried an Egnater Renegade which is a 65W amp head with both a pair of 6L6s and a a pair of EL34s and a blend control and holy s-, this is the tone I've been seeking for many years. Played clean with a Tele, it's gorgeous, sparkly AND full.)

Sounds like a cool plan. However, personally I'd be leary of bridging one channel of 6L6 with one channel of EL34. I'd want to keep the amp split as two mono blocks in that case. Maybe no big deal, but my gut tells me otherwise.

Brad

SarnoMusicSolutions wrote:I'd be leary of bridging one channel of 6L6 with one channel of EL34. I'd want to keep the amp split as two mono blocks in that case.

Upon further reflection, it occurs to me that the Egnater Renegade head must have the 2XEL34 and 2X6L6 sections' output transformers wired in some sort of parallel arrangement because the output from each alone is 45 or so watts whereas together it's 65 watts.