Tube Amp Archive

West Labs is just one guy out of his house. He's just on the other side of town from me. He's an older gentleman who, from what I can tell, used to know some of Michigan's bigger names in rock from the 70's and 80's. He's a nice guy but really quirky, so good luck on getting clear info from him on s...

I haven't really messed with sample rate too much. I think i tried 96khz but didn't adjust my buffer size so playback was messed up. Did you mix down into 16 bit 44.1 khz? If so, did you still notice the "airiness"?

I use an alesis io26 running into an i5 quad core iMac. The biggest improvements I have noticed is acoustic treatment and cab/mic placement. For a little over $100 and a few hours of labor you can build some pretty effective DIY acoustic absorber panels (depending on what kind of tools you have layi...

I built a Rocket variant for a buddy of mine that used 2x cathode biased el34's and i used a classictone 50 watt jcm800 OT. I believe the primary impedance on that one is 3.2k. I've never heard a real Rocket or a clone in real life, but the amp i built sounds badass. And that OT is pretty competitiv...

If by plastic you mean fizzy, you could try lowering the cathode follower resistor from 100k to 68k. That can help get a more "organic" overdrive sound. I've used that trick before with success in marshall style preamps. Might not be what you are looking for but it's an easy mod.

i have been thinking about tearing my 18 watt lite II down when i get it back from a buddy of mine and using a 6u8a in the preamp. my thoughts are doing an input like cliff chappel's october with a dark and bright channel with the two triodes of a 12ax7 and then have those go into the pentode of the...

if you're going to use the two 100R resistors to ground method, don't ground the center tap from the PT's heater winding. two more options to consider are the "humdinger" method, or possibly a heater elevation circuit off of a B+ node. I've never used the "humdinger" but i've read lots of people's e...

Yep. I found structo's layout and also his modified schemo of the rocket with 2 6v6's. Anyone have any suggestions on what OT primary impedance i should shoot for getting my hands on? I'm most likely going to get the iron from edcor.

The whole fixed bias vs cathode bias was actually another question on my mind as well. As i think about it, i imagine that cathode is probably better for getting some better overdriven tones. Did you just use the 18watt power amp and adapt it for 6v6's? I would probably go for a little higher b+ as ...