Anyone here have any experience with amp heads or combos made by Strauss?
going to look / listen to a 15/8 watt Strauss Valve Head. its pretty cheap which makes me nervous
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Anyone here have any experience with amp heads or combos made by Strauss?
going to look / listen to a 15/8 watt Strauss Valve Head. its pretty cheap which makes me nervous
Is it an old one or a new one? They've been around since the 60s. Australian owned company but I doubt they are built here anymore. A friend of mine in high school had a combo passed down from his dad. All I can remember was it was the loudest thing I'd ever heard.
hey all,
seen an ad today which im interested in ( hope ok to post here mods?)
https://www.gumtree.com.au/s-ad/hold...amp/1152320128
seriously thinkin of getting it, tried to research which castes some doubt re build quality, but still seem s reasonable price wise?
interested in community opinion as its unbiased and not sales orientated.
appreciate any advice on what to look for or just steer clear? , i can be a bit impulsive
cheers Gav
Hey Guvna for the cost of $100 I'd go and check it out and make sure he has a cabinet and guitar to test it out. Presuming it has valves check how much hum they have.
Hum? You never know, they may even know the words. ;)Quote:
Originally Posted by wokkaboy
Amp sounded great to my somewhat damaged ears.
not expecting much for cost, but great excuse now to build a cab and avoid some/more DIY danger with High voltage -rocknroll
Attachment 20392
How old is it and was there any history passed on from the former owner?
Hey Waz,Quote:
Originally Posted by wazkelly
i was able to hear and play it today though a celestion vintage 12 and some other 12 name i cant remember, sounded good to my poor ears. way loud (maybe too loud for my intended home use) - i dont have an 8 - 16 ohm speaker as yet
said to be 2years old from eBay and used rarely.
i considered chinese make and limited reviews before buying , cost was good - no humming or crackle upon using/tapping/switching
tubes are common and thought good reason to venture into building a small cab
i got three SS Amps and decent monitors but never had the tube style yet
Thanks Guvna. Looked long and hard at their low watt combo amps but couldn't find any sound clips or videos and Melbourne supplier didn't respond to any emails which made me wonder how one would go if there was a warranty issue. Their heritage is huge but correctly stated that they are now made in China, as are most things these days.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Guvna19
Looks like it should be a cool little amp.
Has anyone built a "lamington" valve amp from Valve Heaven, and if so what's it like
http://www.buildyourownguitar.com.au...ead.php?t=7370Quote:
Originally Posted by JB RETRO
Maddog is building one right now!
Ok will check it out
Researhing Bass Amp questions:
building a JB4-A atm and have no amp or experience with bass's or the amps?
seen a Fender Rumble 30 2nd hand for 100 and gonna check it out.
any feed back on the rumble or other types/brands appreciated.
also, what makes a bass amp so different from a guitar amp?
cheers
Guvna
Quite a few differences between bass amps and guitar amps, though in concept they are quite similar.
1. Bass amps will have different centre band values for their EQ controls. A bass is an octave or more below a guitar, with a low E on a guitar being around 82Hz and low E on bass an octave below that at around 41Hz. So typically, at least the bass and middle EQ controls have a lower frequency centre setting. Often bass amps have an upper and lower mid EQ control.
2. Most bass amps concentrate on clean headroom. Yes some will have drive and/or fuzz options, but most bass amps concentrate on sounding clean until they are very loud. Hence most bass amps are solid state and have large wattage power amps. You can get some high wattage valve bass amps, but they are very heavy as they need a lot of valves and huge output transformers. Whilst they may sound great, you need to be in a band with roadies to take care of all the lifting for you to gig one. A 250W Class D bass amp can now weigh just a couple of kg, so solid state is a much more practical proposition.
3. Almost all bass combos or cabs are tuned enclosures (with the exception of cabs designed for mid- and treble-only frequencies which are often sealed types). Guitar combos and cabs are normally open backed or fully sealed. Speakers aren't very good at reproducing the lower bass frequencies (say less than 60 Hz) at volume. That's fine for guitars with their 82Hz low E, but not for basses. Bigger sized speakers help, but a 2x18" cab isn't going to be very portable. So bass cabs use tuned ported enclosures, where the 'port' (a lengthened connection between the inside of the cab and outside) length and size, is 'tuned' so its resonant frequency boosts the lower bass range of the spectrum, so that the volume of low bass sounds put out by the speaker are amplified because of the port resonance, and so giving a much extended frequency bass sound.
4. The ear is far less sensitive to bass and high frequency sounds than mids. The lower the frequency, the louder it needs to be for it to sound the same volume to the ear as a mid-frequency sound. So in conjunction with tuned cabs, bass amps normally have a basic EQ that boosts the low frequencies more. This takes more amplifier power to do, hence the reason for most bass amps having significantly more power (item 2 above) than a guitar amp. Also why a 30W valve guitar amp can sound louder than a 200W bass amp.
Smaller bass amps (less than 100W) are really for practice only. They have smaller speakers which don't produce a lot of real bass. Which is fine for practice as a lot of bass sound is from the 2nd harmonic, so an octave above the fundamental note but it's never going to make trousers flap.
The Fender is never going to sound wonderful, but for learning bass stuff at home and being portable, it's fine. But it's not going to be loud enough to compete with real drums. Obviously the more you spend, the better sound you can get, even from the smaller bass amps. But for initially learning the bass the Fender will do. But if you stick with bass, then you'd probably soon want something bigger. With a big amp, you can let the amp do all the work and you can play really lightly. With a small amp, you'll need to dig in a lot more to get the volume. Play for too long like that and it becomes hard to change to a different technique.
There is nothing hard and fast on the "what makes a bass amp so different from a guitar amp?" topic... Many resort to the 'If it sounds good then it's fine' approach, which is fine but sometimes there is a cost...
The basic design of a bass or a guitar amp is essentially the same, although the EQ and response of the two can be vastly different. As a general guide/comment a guitar amp will often have poorer bass response than a bass amp as the frequencies below low E are simply not required, however many bass amps will have treble response that can almost match any regular guitar amp but the EQ controls on a bass amp are often not ideal to set a regular guitars tone.....
Secondly is the OD/distortion aspect. Most guitar amps have this built in to the basic design to various better or worse extents, whereas most bass amps are basically designed to run only clean. A notable of bass amp exceptions is the Orange Crush series of bass combo amps, and there are others.
The big differences are mostly in the EQ circuits and in the actual speaker itself (not the cab, but the noise producing device inside the cab). Both are usually tailored to best suit the frequencies of the instrument that is expected to be played through the amp at what is thought to be the volume levels that the 'rig' will be used at. .
Which leads us to the un-written rule that states - You can run a guitar through a bass amp and often it will work, but usually you can't run a bass through a guitar amp as more often than not the guitar amp just won't cut it... The most common reason a guitar amp will 'fail' is that the speaker cone of a guitar speaker is not designed or built to be capable of delivering bass guitar frequencies at the typically expected volume levels.... There are plenty of YouTube videos out there of guitar speakers tearing themselves to destruction attempting to reproduce bass notes at reasonably high volume levels. At low volumes they'll be fine, crank it up to any extent and you'll be down the shop getting new (expensive) set of drivers fitted to you guitar cab pretty quick.
It's not that bass speaker drivers a better, more it's that each driver be they guitar or bass is designed and built to do a different job and at the typical volume levels to do that job well.
As for the Rumble 30 for 100.... it's probably worth it, even it were for only as a universal clean bedroom practice amp...
Hmm thats really interesting. I have an old Ross bass amp from the 70's that is my main 'loud' amp. I've had it forever and it sounds surprisingly awesome. It's one of the first solid state amps from what I can gather. I mostly play straight into the computer these days though so it doesn't get much of a work out. I always get funny looks when I rock up with it, but it really does sound great.
https://i.imgur.com/EaSQ6SKl.jpg
$100 is a pretty cheap asking price and probably good place to start for a beginner considering new price is $399. 10" speakers are quite common these days in Bass Amps too. Auxillary input and headphone socket are handy as is the tilt back design so you can aim the speaker where it can be heard rather than just blowing a breeze below your knees.
30W will sound loud enough until you get seriously into playing bass and there are plenty of 50W & 75W combos that will do a good job of keeping up with a drummer and a live stage sound. I bought a 75W Hartke about 18 months ago which is both very heavy and also very loud, and in hindsight the 50W version would have been good enough. Difference was 10" speaker in 50W vs 12" in the 75W which also had a small 7 band eq, all up cost $399 delivered or $299 for the 50W version.
Sonic, I'm pretty sure those Fame series Ross amps were late 80s (86-88). https://www.usedprice.com/items/guit...50-191485.html
I know I bought a small Fame 10 guitar practice amp around that time. It was actually pretty neat with a great fuzzy drive.
Ross was part of the company that made Kustom amps, and Kustom did make some of the first commercial transistor amps on the market. But these Ross amps seem to be an '80s venture, with various amp series being produced from '82-'88, after making the Ross range of FX pedals in the '70s (of which the Ross Compressor is the most famous these days).
Yeah cool. It's difficult to find much specific information on them. Style wise the cab looked more retro than that to me, but entirely possible it's 80's.
EDIT:
Confirmed. I could never quite work out what the date on the inspection sticker was, but having that ball park it looks like its says '86 to me. Fun to know.
https://i.imgur.com/GJ07RBFl.jpg
https://i.imgur.com/fKqWzcbl.jpg
https://i.imgur.com/q2xrGlNl.jpg
It's certainly got a 70's look about it, but that may have come from the Kustom amps side of things. My little practice amp had the same knobs and knob colours and silver grille cloth.
Wasn't Kustom the amp of choice for John Fogerty / Creedence and from memory maybe the Grateful Dead as well
edited to add. Wiki agrees with my aging memory on the first but not the dead
Hi Guys anybody tried the Yoyo amps seem to be getting a lot of praise and love great write ups reviews for the price.
So tiny but powerful https://youtu.be/p0FjFN1CAGE
https://youtu.be/kxC9DFKlgY8