Boutique SS amps?

[El Jefe]

None of us have prejudices against transistor pedals, so why not SS amps? All the SS guitar amps out there are either low end, made to be totally clean, or are old school and didn't have much thought put into how the power stage would sound when it clips. So.....suppose someone took the same meticulous approach that pedal builders use for tuning overdrives and fuzzes and applied it to making an all-transistor amp designed to sound good when the power section overdrives. Build it with high quality parts, maybe even throw in a nice verb and trem circuit.

It has to be possible, there's nothing magical about vacuum tubes. What's the output transistor equivalent of a JFET? A really huge JFET?

[stratzrus]

http://www.pritchardamps.com/pritchardamps.cfm

[bassinface]

Yeah, why do bass players get to have all the ss fun?
I have a randall/aims ss amp that is ruling my world.
Lets bring on the 70's. srsly.

[tonegangster]

SS amps don't have crystal lettuce.

[gregsguitars]

They are NOT boutique by any means but the Fender red knob Princeton Chorus is a killer SS amp....

[voodoo364]

Roland Blues Cube BC-30 is the one the best amps I've ever had. Two channels Fenderish/Marshallish...for the money...incredible. Just because an amp has tubes does not mean it's always good...

[charley]

Check out Acoustic Image, Henriksen, Evans, and Quilter to start. +1 for Pritchard too.

[teemuk]

All the SS guitar amps out there are either low end, made to be totally clean, or are old school and didn't have much thought put into how the power stage would sound when it clips.

Not all. There are several boutique solid-state products ...and on that note, several threads about them. In just recent months two new boutique amps have appeared from Quilter and AMT. Didn't Retro Channel appear last year and before that there's been Pritchard, Blue Note, Henriksen, etc...

Perhaps take a bit time to research the topic, better yet, actually buy some of those products to keep the industry rolling. If there's no market there's little point to manufacture $$$ items.


As a final note, the quoted sentence doesn't even apply to many "non-boutique" products made out of typical household brands; Vox, Peavey, Roland, etc. Several companies put a lot of effort into designing nicely clipping power stages (T-Dynamics, Valve Reactors, Roland's Tube Logic Stuff, etc.), and you don't need to be "boutique" for that.

[Frank Speak]

The only "boutique" SS I'm familiar with is the Retro Wreck.

[DRS]

+1 Pritchard. There's a Pritchard thread going close by.

[Humancapo]

AER, but's it's a clean platform designed mainly for acoustics. There are many excellent sounding non-boutique SS amps, it just comes down to the player to make them sound great.

[cribcage]

Originally Posted by charley

Check out Acoustic Image, Henriksen, Evans, and Quilter to start. +1 for Pritchard too.

+1 for that list. Henriksen's website has a great explanation why they build their amps that way.

[NAV1147]

i think in the next 1 to 2 years, you might see a couple of real high end SS amps coming out. Now that Matrix amplification has created such an amazing, warm tube like power section thats small and light weight. I ran a friedman brown eye preamp section into a Matrix GT800 and it sounded very close to the real power section of the Friedman.

[El Jefe]

Originally Posted by stratzrus

http://www.pritchardamps.com/pritchardamps.cfm

I've seen that, it's not really what I'm talking about. I mean more like a single channel, NMV amp. Not a modeling/multi-channel/tons of knobs thing. Picture more like a plexi, but SS. There's got to be a way to make a 100w SS power section that overdrives like tubes.


Henricksen/Polytone = made for clean/mostly clean jazz tones. Not what I'm talking about.

Acoustic Image = Their website says "transparent, high fidelity" = Definitely not what I'm talking about. I mean an electric guitar amp that overdrives and can rock and doesn't look like a studio monitor.


I'm picturing something that looks like and feels like a vintage tube amp. Simple circuit, few components. Open it up and you'll see full size parts, no PCB, clean solid core wiring, etc. Everything you'd see in a tube amp but with transistors instead of tubes. That rules out the Peavey/Roland/etc stuff too. I've been down that road years ago and they weren't nearly up to snuff. Ok for clean sounds, but the distortion always sounded like a bad overdrive pedal being fed through a DI into a PA.

[Brian Johnston]

Pritchard amps are not 'modeling' amps. They are analog amps with 'voicing' capabilities, so that you can achieve tones similar to Fender, Marshall, etc.... they are not 'digital,' which uses the term 'modeling.'