Tuesday, May 21, 2013

The next one!

So, still in the process of homebuying, yeah? Brainmeats don't want to stop thinking about amps. This one popped into my head today - okay, I've been thinking about Plexis a lot and it doesn't look like building a Plexi from a kit makes a whole lot of economic sense w.r.t. resale possibilities. And I've got this Crate GT50 Stealth combo that's been begging to be de-Lee Jackson'ed into some proper Marshall thing.

So why not a Plexi? Sounds like a plan, right? Well, my stupid brainmeats got around to thinking about a couple building blocks that it really likes, a couple it really wants to try out, and somehow I convinced myself to build a new "original" design. Well, original in this case means "stolen from Merlin" but... wait, why am I telling you this?! I am a God of Mojo! I invented the pentode!


*cough*

Sorry; I'm a little delirious. I just spent three hours or so typing up this:


Okay, admittedly, the power supply is a little lacking. The rest though... ho ho ho.

So, starting out: the first two stages can be either run in parallel (think: jumpered channels) or cascaded (think: one-wire mod) at the flip of a switch. Then those slam into a small-signal pentode (think: EF86). The sound gets smoothed out by a directly coupled cathode follower and the rest is pretty much "every amp ever made" though I'm going to try to design a lower output impedance long-tailed pair phase inverter so I can ixnay blocking distortion in the FOUR 6V6 OUTPUT SECTION. 

I do have a working OT this time but I've got to pick a PT which means the power supply world is my oyster. I've already started 'funny' for a guitar amp by using a full-wave rectified bias supply.

Okay.

Well, to summarize: this amp is going to be pretty high gain but extraordinarily versatile. Cleans are going to take a back seat to this glorious preamp distortion and who knows what the final result is going to look like considering how many times I changed Bodie around, but man... this'll be interesting.