A majority of builds are made to order, though there are usually a few in stock. You can specify pretty much any part, as long as they’re available, and they test good. You also have a choice of build type, from point-to-point, tag strip, turret board, PCB, or pretty much any hybrid.
Components are chosen for their suitability – not because they are the most expensive, or the most popular. Modern components can out perform and out last many of the traditional components that have been fitted to amps for the last 30 years, many of which are still being fitted today, with few changes to their designs.
The amps are hand assembled from the bottom of the chassis table upwards, starting with valve sockets. A full point-to-point will have some tag trips fitted, and the heater and ground wiring will be completed. The transformers are fitted, and the wiring routed. The main amp can now be wired in. If turret boards or PCBs are being used, these need to be assembled, and then fitted by hand. I tend to start with the power supply and the phase inverter / splitter, so I can move quickly on to the power valves, and give the main power amp a test.
Once I’m happy with the power stage, I wire in the pre-amp stages. This needs to work with no odd dips, oscillations or noise, so wire lengths are kept to a minimum, routing is kept tidy and grounding to a strict method. The tone stages are wired in, and the amp is tested with an audio signal into a dummy load, then with a guitar into a speaker cab. Tweaks are made to the gain structure, and then the remaining parts are fitted. New designs are hooked up to an audio analyser, to have their profile logged and compared to other builds, so that the amp can be voiced.
During the voicing stage, you can choose to modify the tone, gain & break-up profile, though we thing you’ll pretty much love the tone straight out of the box, as it were.
Cabinets, well, now that’s a whole other story…
