variac tests 02

[Jeremy1283]

Phil, damn SWEET lookin' strat man The Inca Silver is a nice color.....looks real good with the fretboard wood

Jeremy, your amp sounds BAD ASSED on 6 ! Sounded like '10' to me

Thanks!

[Tone Slinger]

That Halloween clip has me going I gotta get going in earnest on a new build.

[awangotango]

you'll know you have the amp when it just wants to roar and howl with screaming uncontrollabe zero bass all midrange balls and heart feedback and you don't play the amp as much as you hold back the sound. Ed was basically just a gatekeeper of this roar. If you want to hang your hat on a supposed quote of ed 'backing off' his marshall that is your choice. I feel sylvanias and amperex, the general circuit outlined by ralle, and a good set of original greens is the equation. Then it's just a matter of fine tuning a few values to get the amp to hold together and increase compression and sustain while simultaneosly decreasing distortion and breakup. But it's gotta roar there is no way around it, and the 5150III and bedroom volumes do not roar.

[Jeremy1283]

That Halloween clip has me going I gotta get going in earnest on a new build.

Hell yea! Lmk if you need anymore help.

[Jeremy1283]

you'll know you have the amp when it just wants to roar and howl with screaming uncontrollabe zero bass all midrange balls and heart feedback and you don't play the amp as much as you hold back the sound. Ed was basically just a gatekeeper of this roar. If you want to hang your hat on a supposed quote of ed 'backing off' his marshall that is your choice. I feel sylvanias and amperex, the general circuit outlined by ralle, and a good set of original greens is the equation. Then it's just a matter of fine tuning a few values to get the amp to hold together and increase compression and sustain while simultaneosly decreasing distortion and breakup. But it's gotta roar there is no way around it, and the 5150III and bedroom volumes do not roar.

What values do you speak of?

[rgalpin]

i think the value tweaking awangotango is referring to is unique for every amp - so it becomes a matter of listening and tweaking with each amp rather than a set of values that works in every case.

i heard Beautiful Girls on a Hits of the 70's station this morning and thought about how it's really nothing unique in the sound of the amp - a cranked super lead that is well tuned so that it doesn't freak out when it's cranked - there's probably more unique quality coming from the recording techniques with exquisite reverb and delay that turn ordinary riffage into Van Halen untouchability - plus ed's technique - obviously.

what I am trying to achieve is a sonic quality that i would seek whether it was in a heated quest to achieve VH nirvana or just a simple solid blues sound - it's the stable responsive tight bounce that makes a tone come alive and punch back when it's punched at.

[Strat78]

For VH I think we can assume we are talking the 12xxx layout, and for me that includes the PT and OT orientation as well. Georges 68 kit was pretty much right on the money. I think his dual PT comes the closest, especially when you simply hard wire the two 152 taps instead of wiring it to the dual voltage switch. The values that were up for personal interpretation are the V1B cathode resistor, NFB and ohm tap, PI and pre-amp filtering. Of course the fat cap always comes up. The subtleties come with choosing brands especially for the V1B bypass plate cap; a polypro or a mustard .002 are both ends of the spectrum there. Ha ha, these amps change with the weather and even change within the duration of a song (especially when using a variac, guess the NOS caps are losing their charge ), it's all vary mercurial, but I wouldn't have it any other way.

[rgalpin]

nicely stated! i mean that is a real nice boiling down of the key elements.

mer·cu·ri·al
ˌmərˈkyo͝orēəl/
adjective
1.
(of a person) subject to sudden or unpredictable changes of mood or mind.
"his mercurial temperament"
synonyms: volatile, capricious, temperamental, excitable, fickle, changeable, unpredictable, variable, protean, mutable, erratic, quicksilver, inconstant, inconsistent, unstable, unsteady, fluctuating, ever-changing, moody, flighty, wayward, whimsical, impulsive; technicallabile
"a mercurial temperament"

And out of the things you mentioned - 95% of my time has been spent with those few component values on the board - I need to venture into the other aspects - every time somebody starts in about VOLTAGE values here or there, I start to feel the water quickly coming up under my chin and i mentally scramble for higher, more familiar ground... but i need to explore new areas with my next project. it will require the knowledge gathered and well documented here - i wouldn't even try it without you all here as a living reference.

[awangotango]

the other thing I always keep in mind is the difference between CD and LP

VH on vinyl is not the same thing as CD. It's just a fact. To my ears it's totally different.

This is part of the reason why some guys feel rockstars mod and a more buzzy preamp version of VH sounds just right. They must be using a CD of VHI as a reference. Because all my listening for the last 10 years has been on a quality turntable, my idea of what ed sounds like is much more midrange bloomy and textured and harmonic than what alot of guys are dialing their plexis with. The sound reference of what's in our minds as to what ed's tone is like is not the same and unless you're spinning vinyl to get the reference, I think we are losing something in trying to pay homage and keep the pure essence of that tone alive. I mean it's natural to lose touch of what a vinyl VH experience is if you don't listen to it for a decade or two but it's a beautiful thing let me tell you. Same with all rock n roll made from '68 -'88. It must be played on vinyl, I can't listen to it on a digital deck as it sounds flat and hard to my ears. I hear alot of clips of peoples VH copy that sounds like they use the CD as their reference


If you haven't already, I strongly encourage you all to get a technics direct drive turntable off craigslist for $100 (direct drives seem better suited for rock. I've owned $1000 belt drives that were not as satisfying as a DD), a decent cartirdge like a stanton 881s or an AT440MLa, a decent phono preamp and play all that old rock on it. Plus there is a program that allows you to rip the vinyl onto the hard drive (I recommend lossless WAV) and you get 90% of the vinyl experience but the convenience of a digital file. It still blows away any CD of the same title at least for all the music most of us around here listen to. plus things like coltrane and cannnonball adderley, sax trumpets etc really have a true sound on vinyl.

[awangotango]

regarding things like PT.OT orientation. That's a great example of minute details that may infact be real and matter but it's so small compared to getting the basics right, like volume, dimed, the right tubes and speakers. Guys will worry about tranny orientation and then play at bedroom volume or with a cascade or some other obvious non ed setting and it just is sad because it really is a great sound to play around with and so many kids will never know the joy of a cranked nonmaster marshall. It's a dying art if not dead already. playing through an amp that is howling at you as soon as you crack the volume knob on your guitar is a whole differnt art than what kids are doing today.

[Tone Slinger]

+1 on listening to this great music we love from yesteryears........it sounds best the way it was originally mastered. On vinyl/ turntable. And like mentioned, a vintage turntable.

[awangotango]

right, even modern truntables tend to sound different than during the golden era. The old cheap technics or sony or whatever well made but relatively inexpensive these days direct drive (quartz even better) turntable and any album prior to '88 and it just cannot be topped. The slight extra saturation and harmonic distortion from the vinyl playback system just fits so well with an old marshall it must have been divinly inspired and while the rest of the world seems to be going to heck in a handbasket playing fair warning or allide forces on a technics almost balances it out !

So when I dial in a plexi I intentionally try and add some of this extra harmonic color and bloom into the amp. It can be done with tube choice and slight alteration of 'stock' resistors and caps.

Just like merc magnetics incorprated some of VH I' s color into its eddie clone transformers, we need to dial it into the amp. and the mod5 etc only sets us back from a vinyl experience. If you've saved some of ralles early clips where he had the basic circuit, and even the clips with his jose master, they are very near what I am hearing on the turntable. His attempts imo, have only gotten further from this reference as he's modded his amp. Of course when he took out his OT, that didn't help.

I wonder if ralle is spinning vinyl?

[Strat78]

Went into Barns and Noble last night and they had this new dedicated rack for pressed vinyl, original covers and all: Led Zeppelin, Bad Co., AD/DC....., it must be a familiar but perplexing sight to the young employees when middle age guy's go into a sudden trance in the presence of these items. Will younger generations have these kind of objects that are so richly psychologically transporting when they are older. Still, it occurred to me, these new records are most likely pressed from digitally remastered tracks.

[awangotango]

ted templeman was recording for vinyl, byt yoy're right, alot of the pressings of modern artists are not recorded or mastered specifically for vinyl and so you may as well just buy the CD. Some may just like the tactile experience of holding something while listenind which is cool in itself but for hardcore tone hounds it's all about getting copies of original presses of led zeppelin II etc. I could never enjoy zeppelin, vh or the first 6 zz top records when they are digital CDs. Right now i've got dokken back for the attack playing on the table. Also, alot of modern recording are digital and not on tape, so there's not nearly the sound you'll get when it comes time to decide whether to release it on LP or CD

but yes, it's gone, the whole art of recording to tape and then pressed to vinyl is gone. Soon all the guys who knew anything about it will be gone, just like all the guys who really knew how to make tubes are gone. And like I mentioned before, even the guys who know how to play the old amps the way they were played back then, at volume and more or less straight in will be gone because i'm gettin' up there in age myself.

It's a sad state of affairs to lose such a great art and means of listening but at least we still have original presses of UFO lights out and tables to play them on. The old tables still work fine. They will outlast any of us,

[Tone Slinger]

This thread is, imo, a real break through. ALL ALONG, it was NEVER about what a lone 100 watt Plexi head sounds like. In Ed's case it was about how he integrated, SPECIFICALLY, a variac and a 6 band eq box. There is no such thing as a 'stock' plexi being ran on ten that sounds like that (A Suhr Sl-68 isnt really a 'stock' spec, considering its Cathode values and PPIMV). You can hear an almost 'synthetic' type of midrange just bursting out of Ed's sound, the minute they hit 'On Fire', on any of those '77/'78 boots. This thread is great, because very early on in it, it pretty much demonstrates that the voltage has to be right as well as a certain up front boost. The sliders on Ed's MXR 6 band show that it wasnt just 'slightly' being used........it was frickin' war worldIII . So I think alot more is owed to that little blue box than it has recieved. There are things that can be done to a circuit that can more closely approximate Ed's early tone than trying to make a 'Friedman' spec do it.