While the old amp ideas still live on and may someday see fruition, it will be in a different format. I won't be doing piecemeal perfboards patched together like some sort of permanently wired effect pedal menagerie, I'll make sure I lay the whole thing out on a PCB, and have the whole thing start to finish layed out.
Certain problems will keep me from making my next amp a Trevisol Amp.
One is the footswitch. I can't for the life of me figure out how to make it work without it being part of the signal path. I need to figure out how real footswitches work. I don't want to use a different system just for the sake of being different.
Another is the reverb. It's a major pain in the neck part of the amp, and it would require its own power source, adding to the complexity of building the amp. However, Reverb is a necessity for me.
Finally, the tone circuit itself is not behaving right. I'm investigating why not, but the 3-band EQ'd version of the Eighteen that I built does little more than make a decent clean sound, no crunch whatsoever.
So, for the time being, I've scored an amp that's got the same idea as I do: fun with transistors. Above you see the chassis of a rather rare Marshall 5215 Combo. This combo used a single 15" speaker and delivered 100 Watts of Marshall goodness through two channels.
For my purposes, 100 watts will rarely be useful, so the format will be a 2x12:
Yes, the Bluesbreaker-style form factor won out. I was using a micro-stack at Sam Ash the other day when I realized how unergonomic it was. Like all forward-facing control schemes, you couldn't see what the knobs were if you were standing right next to the amp. I don't need to remind you how un-rock it is to bend way over to adjust your amp during, after, or before a song.
So the tilted-control 1962 2x12 has emerged as my favorite form factor. The 21" Height (plus casters) makes it easy to reach while playing, the tilted chassis makes seeing what you're doing easier, and I may even put a cold cathode light in to illuminate the panel.
The reason 2x12 lends itself to my needs is because of the wiring schemes. With 2 8ohm speakers, I can switch the wiring from parallel (letting the amp provide the full 100 watts at 4 ohms) to series (cutting the amp's output to 25 watts at 16ohms).
More info when the amp chassis arrives!
