Who's going to the NY/NJ amp show? June 5-6

[J Moose]

Re: Who's going to the NY/NJ amp show? June 5-6

^ Definitely the first time I've seen a speaker almost blown by a hologram!

Not the first time I've seen it, but it WAS the first time in a long time!


I'm uploading about 50 pictures to photobucket now. I'll come back with a full report later when I've got more time... but this should get 'ya going.

http://s24.photobucket.com/albums/c32/Jmoose/NY-NJ Amp Show June 2010/

Overall, good times even though some of ya'll punked out! Show was smaller this year then last year... not such a bad thing. I spent quite a bit of time at the Eventide booth... think a modfactor might be in my future. Lots of other good stuff was about...

 

[Red_Label]

Re: Who's going to the NY/NJ amp show? June 5-6

Am I seeing that right? The Bruno cab with bottom ports, one front-loaded 12 and one rear-loaded 12? Hmmm... wonder if one could tell the difference in sound between that and one or the other? I don't think my ears are that good.

Also, what's that orange-colored head to the left of the Bruno? Me likey!

 

[TwilightOdyssey]

Re: Who's going to the NY/NJ amp show? June 5-6

^ You're correct. It was done for design, not sonic purposes, according to the cabinet guy. The room was for KW cabinet design. Nice work and REALLY tight 4x12 cab; perhaps the tightest I've heard yet, and I own two VERY tight cabs (Rivera and Hiwatt).

 

[J Moose]

Re: Who's going to the NY/NJ amp show? June 5-6

Also, what's that orange-colored head to the left of the Bruno? Me likey!

That orange tolex head was some sorta one-off built in California for a guy who was hauling it around the show, trying cabs out. I saw him toting it around on a handtruck a good while after I took those pictures in the KW room. It IS a cool looking amp, smoked plexiglass panel and had several mini-switches on the front for gain/voicing.

The KW cabs looked great, but I dunno about the tone. There was a sizeable rack tucked out of sight behind the cabs that I didn't even see until I almost left the room. At one point the guy from KW was fiddling with something behind the amps and the sound changed rather dramatically... asked "how's that?!"

Look between the two heads just under the banner and you can make out the edge of the rack and the logo on an isp decimator!!! Tricky!

This is a crappy, fuzzy shot but the rack is pretty easy to see here...

More holograms I guess.

 

[Red_Label]

Re: Who's going to the NY/NJ amp show? June 5-6

That orange tolex head was some sorta one-off built in California for a guy who was hauling it around the show, trying cabs out. I saw him toting it around on a handtruck a good while after I took those pictures in the KW room. It IS a cool looking amp, smoked plexiglass panel and had several mini-switches on the front for gain/voicing.

The KW cabs looked great, but I dunno about the tone. There was a sizeable rack tucked out of sight behind the cabs that I didn't even see until I almost left the room. At one point the guy from KW was fiddling with something behind the amps and the sound changed rather dramatically... asked "how's that?!"

Look between the two heads just under the banner and you can make out the edge of the rack and the logo on an isp decimator!!! Tricky!

This is a crappy, fuzzy shot but the rack is pretty easy to see here...

More holograms I guess.

[/IMG]

Interesting. Those cabs look cool, but I'm a gigging musician, so I never look at that stuff because I wouldn't want to subject it to road rash.

That orange head reminds me a little of the H&K Triamp MkI that I used to have. I like the way that smoked plexi-glass looks against the orange tolex.

 

[Ark]

Re: Who's going to the NY/NJ amp show? June 5-6

Had a great time again at the Show.

The highlight for me was the incredible new amp from Aleksander Niemand called the "Zagray!"

Ubelievable new approach to amp design, simply breathtaking tone!!!

 

[TwilightOdyssey]

Re: Who's going to the NY/NJ amp show? June 5-6

Had a great time again at the Show.

The highlight for me was the incredible new amp from Aleksander Niemand called the "Zagray!"

Ubelievable new approach to amp design, simply breathtaking tone!!!

Don't know if I caught that one. Will have a look-see.

 

[J Moose]

Re: Who's going to the NY/NJ amp show? June 5-6

I think I missed those too, the Zagray amps. Hmmm... thought I saw/heard almost everything but I guess I didn't!!!

Anywhoo! Pictures! Report!

The show was a bit smaller this year then last year... not too small, on the contrary it was a good size and not too mobbed which was great. I was able to get into every room I wanted too, in a few cases I had to come back 10-15 minutes later but it really wasn't a big deal.

Broke out the camera in the Black Cat pedals room... who's that playing a Zemaitis?!? The 'super fuzz' was amazingly sick. Fuzz face sorta fuzz but with a bit of an octavia thing happening. Even with chords it held together, though only simple root/5 power chord voicings. I was highly tempted to buy the "blem" they had on hand... really tempted! The bass fuzz was equally sick and had a killer "envelope" thing happening. Big, fat and nasty that was!

Next was Goodsell with Wampler pedals and the WGS speaker guys. Loved the new orange tolex Goodsell. It was the only one built, Richard said that if someone bought it he'd have to remember what he did!!! Its based on a Supro/Valco thing and was rich and 3D, especially with humbuckers. Like a ticket to Jimmy Page-ville.

Fuchs had their usual stuff which was great as usual... and they also had these new tube driven delay pedals. Tube delay, no tape. Good stuff.

In keeping with the "smaller" vibe this year, the pedalboard from hell wasn't quite as hellish as past years. Still way more pedals, switches and knobbies then I want in front of me at a gig!

These guys were hanging out in the Antique Electronics/Jensen room and were made by one of the folks who works at Antique. Best place to get parts and tubes, hands down. Great people too. They had a bunch of cabs & speakers to try out... good stuff.

Couple more shots of the KW cabs booth here. I thought the little Emery amps were pretty cool...

ARK!!! Great sounds here... warm but not mushy. The amount of skill that goes into the cabinetry here always amazes me. I know how hard that stuff is to pull off... hey guys, how about one of your amps in a road-worthy black tolex box eh?

They were sharing space with a guitar/bass maker who had some equally outrageous stuff on display. Sorry I missed the name of the builder... room was pretty busy when I popped in;

oK, I've hit the wall with 5000 characters and need to create a second post... I also need to get to a session. More pictures later! This is barely half!!!

 

[J Moose]

Re: Who's going to the NY/NJ amp show? June 5-6

Couple doors over from ARK was the Phil Jones bass booth with another custom instrument builder. Crazy stuff in here. The bass cabs are super high power and are filled with 5 inch drivers! Yes! 5 inches!!! Lots of 'em!!! Great sounds all around. The guy who was playing the 12-string acoustic was pretty tasty and the intonation on that instrument was downright frightening. I love the look of the firetele... felt like glass too. Hi-fi and very nice.

Sommatone was there with a bunch of new amps and old favorites on display... Jimmy builds good stuff. Even his "modern" amps like the Outlaw have a classic feel and voice to 'em.

Down the hall and around a couple corners was Voodoo who had not one, but TWO rooms side by side. One had all the amps to try out while the other room was an 'endorse' play booth of sorts. Lots of guys shredding to backing tracks, concert style. I didn't get any pictures of that since it was usually mobbed and blocked with people (in black voodoo shirts no less) and flight cases all day not to mention very very loud. It was rather annoying actually... why have a room and essentially block it off???

Carol Ann amps...

I went past the Celestion room a few times and it by far, as usual had some of the tastiest tones and players all day. How can 'ya go wrong with a couple Brunos, Wrecks and Dumbles? This guy playing the SG was a nasty slide player! Frightening.

I didn't really get a chance to hear the Tomaszewicz amps but that blue half-stack is a total eye catcher. Too bad the picture is fuzzy... doesn't do it justice.

Here's the "East Amps" from Jeff Bober (ex-budda) that TO was drooling over all day. That's a 2-watt and 18-watt head perched on 1x10 pine cabs. Good stuff.

Bunch of pedals on display at Far East Electronic... they're based out of Japan and there was only one guy who spoke not-to-good English which was much better then my Japanese, but what I managed to gather was that the pedals are original designs that are hand-built in Japan. They also had a few combo amps on display but that picture didn't come out.

Bunch of colorful heads at the Reinhardt room.

Prymaxe Vintage brought the whole damn store to the show!!! I guess maybe because they're only 20 minutes away but good gravy, the amount of pedals on display here was jaw-dropping. If it wasn't there its not available! Up front they had a couple oK amps... and another 3-Monekys amp in the back section of the room that I didn't get a picture of.

That rounds out the pictures! I didn't come close to getting shots of everything but this is a pretty good representation of the smorgasbord of tools that were on display to fondle!

 

[JeffB]

Re: Who's going to the NY/NJ amp show? June 5-6

Great pics- I WISH I could have made it.

yet at the same time, I think it would have been bad..there's wayyyyy too much "booteek" gear out there these days...I'd go nuts trying to figure out what to get with all those choices. Analysis Paralysis.


(that orange Voodoo combo really caught my eye -anyone know what it is/play it?)

 

[TwilightOdyssey]

Re: Who's going to the NY/NJ amp show? June 5-6

Voodoo amps sound like poop.

 

[J Moose]

Re: Who's going to the NY/NJ amp show? June 5-6

Great pics- I WISH I could have made it.

yet at the same time, I think it would have been bad..there's wayyyyy too much "booteek" gear out there these days...I'd go nuts trying to figure out what to get with all those choices. Analysis Paralysis.

I didn't go into every room and take pictures of everything but there was some 'pedestrian' stuff there too. Marshall/Vox had a room with the Class 5, Haze, AC30 etc. Peavey was there... though seemingly barely, and I spent a good amount of time with the cats from Eventide since I'm thinking about getting a Modfactor.

I just didn't spend any time checking out stuff that I can find at GuiTarget...

And yeah, the Voodoo amps were highly unimpressive. I don't know if I'd call 'em krap, but they're high gain and generic sounding. If you put me in a blindfold and asked to pick between one of those and say, a JVM... I'm not sure I'd get it right. No soul there. Kinda flat.

 

[ampswitcher]

Re: Who's going to the NY/NJ amp show? June 5-6

Hi Moose, I was demoing for KwCabs, and the orange head was from surreal amplification, here's the link http://www.surrealamplification.com/amplifiers.htm
Kurt's rack had nothing to do with any trickery or any other kind of hocus pocus. That's his gigging rack. It has a ENGL preamp, a VHT power amp, and some effect units in it. Yes there is an ISP Decimator in it, but I had the same results with just a Diezel VH-4. On the 4x12 cabinet was my Voodoo modded marshall and nothing else as well. You should have tried them for yourself. Kurt's cabinets are the best I have ever played and I have three 2x12's and four 4x12's at home from other so called high end companies and my KWCabs 2x12 smokes them all. I own the purpleheart cabinet that was there. I don't work for Kurt either, I was just passing the KWCab room at the 2009 NY Amp Show and the sound of this guys cabinets stopped me dead in my tracks. I wanted something that sounded like a 4x12 cabinet but in a 2x12. This guy knows how to build an awesome cabinet.

That orange tolex head was some sorta one-off built in California for a guy who was hauling it around the show, trying cabs out. I saw him toting it around on a handtruck a good while after I took those pictures in the KW room. It IS a cool looking amp, smoked plexiglass panel and had several mini-switches on the front for gain/voicing.

The KW cabs looked great, but I dunno about the tone. There was a sizeable rack tucked out of sight behind the cabs that I didn't even see until I almost left the room. At one point the guy from KW was fiddling with something behind the amps and the sound changed rather dramatically... asked "how's that?!"

Look between the two heads just under the banner and you can make out the edge of the rack and the logo on an isp decimator!!! Tricky!

This is a crappy, fuzzy shot but the rack is pretty easy to see here...

More holograms I guess.

 

[ampswitcher]

Re: Who's going to the NY/NJ amp show? June 5-6

Hi red, I had a Tuki cover with a detachable bottom made for my cabinet. I take it everywhere and never any problems. It's a year old now.

Interesting. Those cabs look cool, but I'm a gigging musician, so I never look at that stuff because I wouldn't want to subject it to road rash.

That orange head reminds me a little of the H&K Triamp MkI that I used to have. I like the way that smoked plexi-glass looks against the orange tolex.

 

[KWCabs]

Re: Who's going to the NY/NJ amp show? June 5-6

That orange tolex head was some sorta one-off built in California for a guy who was hauling it around the show, trying cabs out. I saw him toting it around on a handtruck a good while after I took those pictures in the KW room. It IS a cool looking amp, smoked plexiglass panel and had several mini-switches on the front for gain/voicing.

The KW cabs looked great, but I dunno about the tone. There was a sizeable rack tucked out of sight behind the cabs that I didn't even see until I almost left the room. At one point the guy from KW was fiddling with something behind the amps and the sound changed rather dramatically... asked "how's that?!"

Look between the two heads just under the banner and you can make out the edge of the rack and the logo on an isp decimator!!! Tricky!

This is a crappy, fuzzy shot but the rack is pretty easy to see here...

More holograms I guess.

Hello all, this is Kurt Wyberanec of KWCabs. Just wanted to say thanks for those of you with kind words about our cabinets and to just address the post above....

There was nothing "tricky" going on at all with anything in our room, we have a host of amplifiers every show to try and demo whatever particular style of music the person in the room likes most. And likewise we're featuring cabinets so the amps can get tucked away. The rack (which I didn't realize was such a touchy topic) is simply a rack rig. All that was being used in there was a preamp (Engl e580) a power amp (VHT 2902) and noise reduction an ISP decimator, which btw, the way it works it is only active on silent passages, when you play your full tone comes out. So the reason you probably heard a major sound change was simply because I either changed patches to a different setting or I was dialing in sounds the same way you'd do on a head.

We also had a Marshall Superlead attached to a 4x12, a Diezel VH4 attached to a 2x12, a Hughes & Kettner Zentera attached to 2 1x12s and a few different Emery Sound amps running into various cabinets.

The Orange amp in question is by a small boutique builder at Surreal Amps.

The cabinet under the Bruno was made by us as a special matched Headshell set for Bruno. The Headshell is AAAAA Quilted Maple with Macassar Ebony details and it has a matching 2x12 which at the show was loaded with Austin Speaker Works KTS series speakers.

The premise for our cabinets is simple, guitar players love the way that wood interacts with tone, and it's no different for a speaker cabinet. You probably wouldn't play a guitar made of plywood so why should your cabinet be? A speaker cabinet is much the same as an acoustic guitar. They're both simply ressonance chambers. When you change the lumber the tone changes as well. It allows me the ability to be able to fine tune tone to what the player wants, not what I want to give him/her. There is definitely a difference. Then the design incorporates porting. Which leads to a much wider frequency response most notably in the bass. Porting has to have depth, not simply holes cut into baffles the way some companies advertise, those are not ports, they are vents. Combine all that with virtually any speaker and premium components = best speaker cabinet you can buy.

KWCabs is in its 7th year, and has been gaining steam every year. All without major advertising or retail locations. While those are finally in the cards, we're proud to be putting out a product that really compliments its users. If anyone has any questions of any kind, by all means please let me know. My email is kwcabs@aol.com I'm only on the boards once in a while so email is best. Thanks again.

 

[KWCabs]

Re: Who's going to the NY/NJ amp show? June 5-6

^ You're correct. It was done for design, not sonic purposes, according to the cabinet guy. The room was for KW cabinet design. Nice work and REALLY tight 4x12 cab; perhaps the tightest I've heard yet, and I own two VERY tight cabs (Rivera and Hiwatt).

Hi, you must have misunderstood what I meant by design. It was completely done for sonic purposes (design) . The speakers being used were Austin Speaker Works KTS series, a 60 and a 70. The 60 tends to be a little dark, so by front mounting it you can bring out a tad more of the highs. The 70 is the opposite. Front vs rear porting is something that is often in debate, personally I use both methods and clearly sometimes combine them, to try and achieve as closely as possible the tone the player is looking for. Thanks.

 

[KWCabs]

Re: Who's going to the NY/NJ amp show? June 5-6

^ You're correct. It was done for design, not sonic purposes, according to the cabinet guy. The room was for KW cabinet design. Nice work and REALLY tight 4x12 cab; perhaps the tightest I've heard yet, and I own two VERY tight cabs (Rivera and Hiwatt).

Or if you're referring to the ports, they are in fact integral to the sonic design as I explained above. The looks are merely a very nice byproduct.

 

[Surreal Amplifiers]

Re: Who's going to the NY/NJ amp show? June 5-6

Hi guys jerry from Surreal here.
I see Bud brought his amp to the show. If there are any questions about if please contact me. thanx. First post.

 

[TwilightOdyssey]

Re: Who's going to the NY/NJ amp show? June 5-6

Well, thanks to the NY Amp Show I'm now the proud owner of an East Amplification Studio 2! It just arrived at my house ... the next 5 hours are gonna be SLOW!

 

[J Moose]

Re: Who's going to the NY/NJ amp show? June 5-6

Hello all, this is Kurt Wyberanec of KWCabs. Just wanted to say thanks for those of you with kind words about our cabinets and to just address the post above....

There was nothing "tricky" going on at all with anything in our room, we have a host of amplifiers every show to try and demo whatever particular style of music the person in the room likes most. And likewise we're featuring cabinets so the amps can get tucked away. The rack (which I didn't realize was such a touchy topic) is simply a rack rig. All that was being used in there was a preamp (Engl e580) a power amp (VHT 2902) and noise reduction an ISP decimator, which btw, the way it works it is only active on silent passages, when you play your full tone comes out. So the reason you probably heard a major sound change was simply because I either changed patches to a different setting or I was dialing in sounds the same way you'd do on a head.

We also had a Marshall Superlead attached to a 4x12, a Diezel VH4 attached to a 2x12, a Hughes & Kettner Zentera attached to 2 1x12s and a few different Emery Sound amps running into various cabinets.

Hey, yeah... I dunno there...

Its not like rack rigs are bad juju or anything remotely close to it, but I guess I have to wonder why it was hidden away behind all the cabs. I don't recall seeing the other heads either... the H&K or Diezel, just the orange plexiglass head that the guy was playing through.

To be honest, with about two hours to go until close I decided to drop my instrument back in the car and go around show and take as many pictures as possible... that included sticking my head into rooms that I hadn't previously been into and/or looking at things I had very little interest in, just to get pictures for the sake of people who couldn't make it.

That sort of approach precludes spending a whole lot of time in any one place... maybe 5 minutes in each booth. And in the five minutes I was in your room, I saw two amp heads (the bruno and the orange) and saw/heard what I did... which was the guy plugged into the orange head and someone (maybe you?!) reach behind the amp and tweak something (in about 3 seconds total) which resulted in a dramatic change in tone, whatever the cause of it was.

What that could've been I had no idea... change patches? The guy seemed to be plugged directly into the head, which I found out later he was carrying around with him.

Being in the business for as long as I have I'm all too aware of the man behind the curtain if that makes any sense.

Why hide a rack or any amp away like a dirty secret? Makes people wonder... It was an amp show, show some amps!

Regardless of what may have really been happening there (I could care less) the bottom line is that what I saw/heard in those few minutes translated to a very odd vibe. Spidey sense went on alert for sure.

Peace and good happiness stuff,