Home (amp tone and effects placement)

>Just as a matter of curiosity, why don't you build one yourself? I
>mean, you mentioned that Torres has a 5 watt schem out there, and I
>know the schematics for the Champ (also 5 watts) is pretty readily
>available. Can't you take the power amp section out of there and
>install it into some kind of homemade cabinet for your purposes? Or
>are you actually, as it says in your signature, just a "theorist" (as
>I am also--I don't have the experience or the ability to build
>something like this myself either), and would need it to be built for
>you?
>
>I'm really just curious--not trying to be obnoxious. But it seems
>like with the relatively simple, small, low-wattage amp you're talking
>about., it wouldn't be a big deal--or even very expensive to either
>build it yourself or have a custom amp guy build what you're looking
>for for you.

This is not an effective solution for the millions of guitarists and would-be guitarists. I have an electrical engineering degree and have built my own 300 watt amp, effects, and so on. My goal is not to just get my own 5 watt amp. What I would really like to see is a great selection of mass-produced 5-watt amps. There are thousands of 50 watt amps but no 5 watt amps. Almost everyone would really like a 5 watt tube amp. The demand is there, but the designers have been snoozing, or have been slowly working their way down from the stratosphere -- down from 100 watts to 50, 50 to 30, "finally" down to "small" 15 watt amps... well keep on going, guys.

All who are interested, let your voices be heard.

I would also like to see different configurations of amp components rather than the traditional "guitar combo amp" consisting of preamp distortion, tone controls, power tubes, transformer, speaker, and cabinet. I'd like to see products containing a low-watt power amp right inside the chassis of a multieffects unit, between the distortion and echo effects. For convenience, this power amp could drive an inductive load and low-pass filter. But for absolutely professional tone, that internal low-watt power amp could drive a scaled-down speaker isolation cabinet such as the Micro Room. Never would we have to settle for raw preamp tone, unless we so choose. Most people settle for a raw preamp tone not because they really like it, but because it's convenient. But you don't hear raw preamp tone often at all on the rock stations. Probably 95% of rock songs mixed good enough for the radio use a very traditional amp setup with power tubes directly driving mic'd speakers loudly -- because this sounds tangibly better than raw preamp tone.

I want to slap down a couple hundred dollars to buy a 5-watt amp. The Torres kit is too expensive and hard to assemble. It's about $375 plus the optional cost for them to assemble it.

I am going to buy some old tube radios through the antique radios newsgroup and patch my guitar signal into the volume control, and use them to drive a speaker isolation cabinet. But I would like a more elegant, custom-designed approach tailored for guitar.