NAD! (Finally...)

[Securb]

I love it. Very sweet amp

[esandes]

Yes, it's made in Vietnam, not China. I don't equate country of origin to quality, but I also wouldn't say these are exceptionally well-made.


Exhibit A, your honor, from the head I had replaced. The headshell is some kind of MDF or something, and I think actual solid wood would add a lot of durability and not a lot of cost.

There's a lot of contradiction in sentence #2.

[misterwhizzy]

I want an Origin 20 head. They sound great through greenbacks, and were easy to get good towns out of.

I’m running my 50 through Green Berets. I went for the 50-watter because the power section is fixed-bias, and it has a 20-watt version at the flick of a switch. For what it’s worth, I like the 20-watt mode a lot better than the 50 because it sounds much more brittle in the higher powered mode. Twenty watts is where it’s at with this amp for those chewy Marshall mids.

[Ewizard]

It is hard to get the level of drive needed without an additional gain stage in the path. If one tube is a phase inverter and the other is for the FX, that means only one tube creates 100% of the distortion the amp can make. There is no way to get the amount of drive the amp has with only two stages of gain. This is why I believe there is solid-state magic happening. It may utilize diodes as the JCM-900 does? It may have a couple of transistors? I highly doubt that ALL the gain is done with a single tube though.

The Egnater Tweaker series utilizes a transistor to get the gain it has. Several amps do in fact, like the Orange micro terror.

I'm not saying I'm right, I'm just saying my experience tells me there is more to this design than what is obvious. I did not expect there to be a valve driven FX loop; to me, that seems like a waste of resources. It has a tube for the phase inverter, leaving only 1 tube for ALL the possible gain the amp has ( assuming 100% tube driven ). It can do crunch with that, but not Marshall crunch. They can be switching in and out some bypass caps on the cathodes of the tubes, but that won't take you from clean to mean.



Looking at the picture of the amp, I see 9 transistors, 3 IC's, and 5 relays. There are three transistors near the first preamp tube. There is also a relay right there too. As best I can tell, it is a standard tube input driving into a standard second tube stage, and then there is a transistor that does something, and the second transistor I am guessing is a normal gain stage, and the third one is the make-up gain stage for the tone stack? Again, not 100% sure, but as best I can tell. What I can say with certainty, is that all the gain of the amp is NOT coming from 1 tube worth of gain stages.

It is irrelevant anyway though. All that matters is that you are happy with what you are getting from the amp. You will not hear me say that transistors are bad, or not worthy, only that the marketing and design choices are misleading or not ideal. Transistorized amplifiers are great, especially when you know that you are getting a transistorized amp. The Orange Crush series is AMAZING. The stuff Randall was making in the '80s and '90s was amazing. The Ibanez Tone Blaster is killer! The Egnater tweaker is a cool amp, I own one, but it is not my favorite. I postulate on amp design because I design amplifiers, sometimes my blind impression of the design of an amp is wrong.