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Post subject: Re: Vintage Fender Solid State amps-where did they go?
Posted: Wed May 09, 2018 4:56 pm
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Had to smile when I saw this topic... it was the late '60's and we all had our stacks of Fender Combo's and Cabinets. Our bass player had two Bassman amps (one black, one silver) and complained he was never loud enough. Anyways, we were playing in some huge HS gym and he showed up with this little, tiny Solid State Bassman amp - plugged it into his two cabinets. I can't say what the sound quality was like, but, by the geeze, it was the loudest bass amp I'd ever heard!!


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Post subject: Re: Vintage Fender Solid State amps-where did they go?
Posted: Sun May 13, 2018 1:50 pm
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Retroverbial wrote:
CB91710 wrote:
I'm also old enough to remember when car speedometers changed from:
"10 - 20 - 30 - 40 - 50 - 60 - 70 - 80 - 90 - 100 - 110 - 120"
to
"15 - 25 - 35 - 45 - 55 - 65 - 75 - 85"


LMFAO

My 1980 Z28 had one of those 85-MPH clocks

A Z28!?!?!?!

Of course I routinely could (and would) bury the needle just for $hits and giggles.

:wink:

Arjay


Looking back, it’s mind-boggling that there was an actual federal regulation that said the speedo couldn’t go above 85mph. But I had a 1984 Mustang SVO, and Ford managed to thumb their nose at the Feds: the speedo labels stopped at 85, per the law, but the needle travel and tick marks went well past that, to about 145. Good on the Ford SVO team!


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Post subject: Re: Vintage Fender Solid State amps-where did they go?
Posted: Sun May 13, 2018 2:29 pm
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Those SVO's were some baddass rides!

Rawk on!

Arjay

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Post subject: Re: Vintage Fender Solid State amps-where did they go?
Posted: Fri May 25, 2018 7:08 pm
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Well it appears some of them are out there on Fleabay! $200 is the opening bid and of course zero bids...$200 for the six ten inch CTS Alnico speakers is a good price, of course that might be offset by actually having this amp delivered to your front door!!!

https://www.ebay.com/itm/Vintage-Large- ... SwPYpa-3Pl

:mrgreen:

T2

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Post subject: Re: Vintage Fender Solid State amps-where did they go?
Posted: Sat May 26, 2018 4:52 pm
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T2Stratman wrote:
$200 for the six ten inch CTS Alnico speakers is a good price...


+1

The remaining effluvia would make a pretty good anchor for a bass boat.

:lol:

Arjay

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Post subject: Re: Vintage Fender Solid State amps-where did they go?
Posted: Sat May 26, 2018 7:21 pm
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T2Stratman wrote:
$200 for the six ten inch CTS Alnico speakers is a good price, of course that might be offset by actually having this amp delivered to your front door!!!

I could go pick it up for $100 in gas if I can get it into my Corolla. It would be a bit more if I have to take the Rav4.

But I'm not sure what I'd do with six 10" drivers. I built a 4x10 to match my Carvin years ago and loaded it with Carvin VL10s.

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Post subject: Re: Vintage Fender Solid State amps-where did they go?
Posted: Sat May 26, 2018 7:58 pm
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CB91710 wrote:
But I'm not sure what I'd do with six 10" drivers.


Easy enough to answer, Rich.

You use four for a tasty Super Reverb restoration and save the other two for a Vibrolux Reverb (or two Princeton Reverbs).

Then buy a bass boat so the rest of the amp doesn't go to waste.

:wink:
Arjay

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Post subject: Re: Vintage Fender Solid State amps-where did they go?
Posted: Sun May 27, 2018 5:51 pm
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Retroverbial wrote:
effluvia

Image


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Post subject: Re: Vintage Fender Solid State amps-where did they go?
Posted: Mon May 28, 2018 2:02 pm
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I have to wonder if these amps are the ones that caused this:

From encyclopedia.com
White quit less than two years later in a dispute over the quality of an amplifier that CBS planned to introduce. He wrote, “I asked all of my key personnel to come to the conference room. I told them that I had too much respect for Leo to have any part in building something that was not worthy of having his name associated with it.”


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Post subject: Re: Vintage Fender Solid State amps-where did they go?
Posted: Mon May 28, 2018 4:42 pm
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vinyl wrote:
I told them that I had too much respect for Leo to have any part in building something that was not worthy of having his name associated with it.”

Shame that this was only the beginning of more than a decade of CBS tarnishing Leo's name

In another thread, a comment was made about FMIC being nothing but stockholders looking for profit, and while economically that is true (very few successful people/groups are in business for the love of the business), it is certainly nothing new, and CBS is a prime example.
In the early 90s, a traffic signal supplier consolidated several successful companies. My boss always joked that they took six three million dollar companies and turned them into one two million dollar company.

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Post subject: Re: Vintage Fender Solid State amps-where did they go?
Posted: Sat Jun 23, 2018 10:02 am
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Hi there,
this is a really interesting thread - in particular I appreciate the input from those who actually have owned and played these ill-fated amps!

You might be interested in an article on the Solid-State Twin Reverb that I recently put together with two fellow scientists cooperating at GITEC (https://gitec-forum.de/wp/en/), a small German not-profit organization indedicated to scientifically investigating the electric guitar and associated amplification. We actually found a SS TR here in Southern Germany and took advantage of this possibility to take a close look at it. These amps do have a weird, dysfunctional kind of historic significance, after all ...

The 3-part article can be found here:
https://gitec-forum.de/wp/en/new-scientific-article-the-1967-fender-solid-state-twin-reverb-the-edsel-of-amps/

We found that indeed there are some serious issues with the amp, especially that it lacks a conducive short-circuit protection, and it is doubtful that the small heat-sink will provide sufficient cooling if the amp is cranked for any extended periods of time. Serviceability is also not at the level we are used to from the tube Fender amps (Forrest White certainly had a point there). However, other than that, it is actually not a bad amp for what is was designed for! It sounds very decent clean, and its distortion (when 3/4-dimed) is not bad at all, either. We recorded some sound samples, comparing the SS Twin Reverb with a blackfaced 1974 tube Twin Reverb.

Any comments you might have (including any issues you might find with my English) would be very welcome!

Kind regards from Munich - have a great weekend!

Tilmann


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Post subject: Re: Vintage Fender Solid State amps-where did they go?
Posted: Sat Jun 23, 2018 12:13 pm
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OrangeJBL wrote:
......comparing the SS Twin Reverb with a blackfaced 1974 tube Twin Reverb.


You'll find very little distortion with a tube Twin Reverb, blackfaced or otherwise. The amp simply was not designed to produce the complex odd-order harmonics necessary to drive the power-amp stage into clipping and the linearity of the pre-amp all but guaranteed very little compression. The solid-state version of the Twin Reverb may distort when driven but if you look at the signals produced on an oscilloscope you'll observe mostly square waves, which do not translate well into pleasing musical tones. The amps in this series were extremely clean and designed deliberately so, and were well suited for bass guitar and PA/SR applications. But as guitar platforms, most players found them lacking in warmth and typical Fender ambience.

Arjay

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Post subject: Re: Vintage Fender Solid State amps-where did they go?
Posted: Sat Jun 23, 2018 12:25 pm
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Ya... I really WANTED a Twin Reverb, but after spending a few hours with various amps and not being able to get a good "Euro-Metal" tone out of the Twin, I was down to a coin-toss between the Sunn Beta Lead 212 and Peavey Deuce.
The Deuce won out, having a tube power amp, and while it was able to produce the tones that I wanted, it wasn't the most reliable, having to go in for repair twice in 2 years, both times it was problems with the integrated circuits. Probably poor component positioning near the heat from the output tubes.
In retrospect, maybe I should have considered a Marshall, but I never thought of them as a source for a 212.

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Post subject: Re: Vintage Fender Solid State amps-where did they go?
Posted: Sat Jun 23, 2018 1:14 pm
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Thanks for your input - you may have inspired a fourth part of the article where we do a signal analysis of the output signals of the amps under overload conditions!

We find that a (tube) Twn Reverb actualy does distort quite a bit (with a humbucker guitar it will start to distort from about 4 on the volume) scale, and does distort quite nicely - albeit of course not to the massive distortion degree that modern high-gain amps feature but more in a classic overdrive way. It will be very loud, though!

I was surprised that the solid-state TR sounded not bad at all when overdriven. It has even less gain than the tube TR so it needs to be turned up further on the volume control scale but it will give an ok hard-rock rhythm guitar sound (in the AC/DC-direction, or a bit like Joe Walsh’s sound on the live version of Walk Away, when used with the right guitar). Again, this amp will be really loud, as well, at that point. But it does not have any of that ugly distortion that I would associate with transistors - unless you turn it to 10 with a humbucker guitar (only then it will start to break up in an ugly way, after all - to my ears, anyway).

This is all theory, though - I would not reconnend to play the SS TR in this overdrive mode for any extended periods of time, though - we were a bit scared to fully turn it up even for a short time for our sample recordings, because we do not trust the puny heatsink to dissipate enough heat.

Greetings!


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Post subject: Re: Vintage Fender Solid State amps-where did they go?
Posted: Sat Jun 23, 2018 1:47 pm
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My first *real* PA was Fender's solid-state PA4100 which AFAIK used the same output stage configuration as the transistorized 105-watt Twin Reverb and Bassman, bought new in late '67 in conjunction with my first new Fender Amp (a silverface Super Reverb). It was superior in both performance and reliability to competing ensembles from Kustom and Shure. We pushed it hard many times and never had any problems with overloading or thermal shut-down. In my three+ years of ownership I think the only issue to ever arise was a couple of blown speakers. The amp itself was Rock-Of-Gibraltar dependable.

Arjay

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