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Go FUCHS Yourself


MTM105

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16 hours ago, bubs_42 said:

That is what a good amp will let you do. I just barely goose the front end and everything else comes from rolling the volume knob up and down and working my pick attack. 

 

36 minutes ago, bubs_42 said:

Totally missed out when Andy sold Greg Allmans's ODS. The Open Back 2x12 has been my favorite of there cabs, second is the ported one I sold you. 

Andy had Black Crows touring combo avail a year or two ago he sold to a teen.

Someday...ODS, perhaps.  Not sure I'll like it, though.  Everyone else seems to.  I'd have to try prior to purchase, I guess.  Can't afford new.

I don't like having tweaking as an option.  Too tempting to get lost.  I'd rather plug in and play.

 

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3 hours ago, MTM105 said:

 

Andy had Black Crows touring combo avail a year or two ago he sold to a teen.

Someday...ODS, perhaps.  Not sure I'll like it, though.  Everyone else seems to.  I'd have to try prior to purchase, I guess.  Can't afford new.

I don't like having tweaking as an option.  Too tempting to get lost.  I'd rather plug in and play.

 

I hear you, I played one, with the matching Feiten 2x12 loaded with TT Greens. It sounded good, but I chose the Blackjack 21 MK2. Andy and I discussed it over a few emails and the MK2 is based on the ODS30 and I have to say its a great amp. I used channel one so much and that is why I moved to the MK1 amps. 

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27 minutes ago, 0054 said:

Bubs, you got any Fuchs left?

 

You think he gives a Fuchs?

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1 hour ago, 0054 said:

Bubs, you got any Fuchs left?

 

Sold my last one to MTM105. I would buy one again, I still think they are great amps. I would have been better off leaving one of the 21's in a 1x12 combo cab with a WGS reaper HP and my sound level would have been low enough maybe to hit the sweet spot. 

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1 hour ago, 0054 said:

Bubs, you got any Fuchs left?

 

Keep checking Guitar Center on line.

After I pulled trigger 2-3 weeks ago, I found Blackjack 21 MKI head dropped to $499.

BJ Combo NK II was around $849.

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2 minutes ago, MTM105 said:

Keep checking Guitar Center on line.

After I pulled trigger 2-3 weeks ago, I found Blackjack 21 MKI head dropped to $499.

BJ Combo NK II was around $849.

When we are talking about the Black Jack 21 Version 1, I can give just a little advice. If you want cleaner with a little more headroom, the later ones with the chassis mounted up are more stabler amps. The earlier ones are closer to trainwrecks and they are more wild and dirty. Tubes made a difference but all the ones that I owned tended to go in those directions. My co-guitarist in the band has my first Version 1 and it took a lot to get that one wrangled in to sound really good. He uses it with a Bogner Shiva Ported 2x12.

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1 hour ago, 0054 said:

I will say too, at that price, I prefer ptp/hand wired

Fuchs, Tone King, Soldano, Suhr, Bogner.

Sound Quality

Contrary to what you may have heard, great tone is not the exclusive domain of point to point wired amps. Even the use of top quality components and meticulous assembly methods do not guarantee good tone. There are plenty of examples of great and lousy sounding products in both point to point and PCB categories. There are well built, mediocre sounding amps and sloppily thrown together, great sounding amps. In fact, undesirable sonic characteristics frequently attributed to circuit boards are much more likely to occur in point to point wired amps. Stray capacitance, phase cancellation, signal degradation, and crosstalk between stages are common problems in point to point designs. Most of these conditions are easily minimized or eliminated in a well executed PCB design.

One interesting and often overlooked side benefit of PCB design is the ability to precisely control the way the board will "sound" by experimenting with placement of sensitive components. We frequently use this technique of "tuning the board" to tweak various parameters of a circuit which might normally be accomplished with the relatively "brute force" use of added capacitance or tone robbing bundled wire harnesses.

Consistency

One of the most attractive benefits of PCB construction is their inherent consistency. Once the design is complete, it can be easily reproduced with a very high degree of accuracy. In our particular case, the object is to produce an amplifier that meets a set of pre-defined sonic and functional criteria. These criteria are built into the board design and are not subject to the wide variations in tolerances normally found in the point to point assembly process.

In the late fifties, state of the art point to point construction ( i.e. military and recording/broadcast electronics) incorporated "turret boards" that supported most of the small components on Nickel/Silver plated posts staked into thick Fiber or Glass/Epoxy strips. The bulky components (pots, jacks, switches, filter caps, meters and transformers) were chassis mounted and meticulously hand wired to these boards. Some of todays more popular (and more expensive) point to point amps utilize low cost phenolic "terminal strips" with thin Tin plated lugs instead of the much more rugged turret boards. This is a far cry from the venerable point to point designs of the past. The terminal strip method is not particularly rugged or easily serviceable, usually requires much more extensive use of wire, solder and wiring harnesses, and often results in a circuit layout that is subject to wide variations in circuit behavior. Two identical amplifiers built this way are very likely to - and often do - sound completely different!

Reliability and Serviceability

Needless to say, there is a right way and a wrong way to do everything. One might be a little bit more generous and say that there are an infinite number of interpretations of the term "cost effective". Indeed! There are of course legitimate reasons for peoples seemingly genetic aversion to printed circuit boards and all one has to do it gaze into the guts of a PCB amp that falls into the "cheaper to replace than repair" category to see why this is so. Its a fact however, that circuit boards dominate the electronics industry. Therefore it is important to remember that the Internet connection you are using to access this web page is bouncing off of a satellite orbiting our fair planet that will probably operate flawlessly far into the next centuryutilizing printed circuit boards.

How then do we account for this large reliability gap? Simply stated, printed circuit boards pretty much do exactly what the designer intended for them to do. Nothing more, nothing less. If top notch performance and long term reliability are the design objectives, then the end product will perform and last provided that it is correctly engineered. In this context then, it is logical to conclude that a well designed, high quality PCB based amplifier is more than likely to perform as well or better and last easily as long as or longer than a point to point wired amp.

Cost

All things considered, we feel that the point to point method of amplifier construction is unnecessarily time consuming and excessively costly. When you pay a premium price for a quality point to point amplifier, it is pretty much understood and taken for granted that youre not necessarily paying for performance and flexibility. A well designed and executed PCB based amplifier sacrifices nothing to sound quality, construction quality or long term reliability and value merely as an automatic consequence of the use of printed circuit boards. The labor saving aspect of PCB amplifier construction makes it possible to offer a wide variety of features and functions which translate to a higher "Bang for the Buck" ratio.

 

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28 minutes ago, 0054 said:

I never meant boards to be negative of quality, but for being worked on, handwired is easier

IMHO the ODS and the Casino's are kind of a stab at giving the end user as much as possible to tweak. This all came from Andy's feedback from players and dealers. They kind of pushed back on the original Casino Line Up, he was in that Dr Z price point and couldn't break through. Rest assure that the companies named above use the best boards of the highest quality. They are very serviceable with no issue. Now the cheap overseas throwaways are a whole other story. 

Small builders are easy to work with, Andy, Annette and team have never let me down when it came to any issues or questions. 

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On 1/2/2018 at 5:06 PM, 0054 said:

I never meant boards to be negative of quality, but for being worked on, handwired is easier

why bother working on an amp??

it's either good-to-go, or it's not.  today's knowledge and technology is far removed from days of Plexi and Bassman yore.

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