My Legacy Valve Edition 5 Plus guitar amp.

Thought that I would start a thread about my Legacy Valve Edition 5 Plus guitar amp, actually, from what I've read online it is really a re-branded Epiphone Valve Special, I seem to remember buying it from my local Top End Sounds Pro Music shop a few years ago, normally it retailed for something like $299.00 or so, but I managed to buy it for about $150.00 if my memory serves me right, so why was I able to buy it for about half the price?, simple, there were two broken white plastic fuse-holders which were preventing the amp from functioning properly, after looking at the circuit diagram of the amp, I worked out that they were originally there to protect the heater-supply winding of the power transformer, since the fuse holders were broken no heater-power was getting to the three valves, to fix the amp I simply removed the fuse holders and joined the wire-ends up to where they were supposed to go, soldered them and then used heatshrink to insulate the soldered joints, result....the amp burst into life again.

I'll post a pic of the amp shortly soon as I can take a good pic with my digital camera.

Here we go:

Attachment 19702


My Legacy amp uses two 12AX7 preamp valves and one EL84 power valve to generate about 5 watts of audio power, when I got the amp back home from uni, I decided to swap out the stock speaker for the Jensen C10Q speaker (luckily they were both 10 inch types) that was in my Peavey Backstage plus amp, I'm going to be buying another brand-new Jensen C10Q later on this year for the Peavey amp anyway, swapping out the speaker made a big difference to the tone of the Legacy amp, I'll see if I can make a demo recording of it later on once I get my condenser mic back from uni.

Before I forget, I should also mention that my Legacy amp also has some solid-state circuitry in it but that's mostly for the reverb and DSP FX.

One thing's for sure, it definitely likes being overdriven by my Rangemaster pedal, I'm getting a pretty good Blues sound at the moment, will definitely include it in the demo recording of the amp.


The amp is only rated to put out 5 Watts of audio power, but don't let this fool you, it's a loud 5 Watts, especially if you use a Rangemaster Treble-Booster pedal to push the amp harder into overdrive after maxxing-out the Master Volume and Gain controls.

That looks freakin cool! great bargain Doc

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Andy40

That looks freakin cool! great bargain Doc

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Cheers mate, I reckon it's a cool amp, in a retro kind of way that is, since it's only a 5 Watt amp you can easily get good bedroom volume sounds out of it, it seems to really like being overdriven and the thing I like most about it is that it doesn't get ear piercingly loud, and if it isn't loud enough for a gig you can just mic it up and put it through a big P.A. system, I've also got one of those old battery-powered Pignose amps (it's a solid-state amp but apparently some big name studio producers have recorded with one), might do a thread on it tomorrow.

Looked at some of the Epiphone versions and it does have lots of that retro vibe happening.

I'm going to be ordering a set of new valves for the Legacy amp from Evatco soon, maybe in a couple of fortnight's time, I'll see if they have some decent EL84 valves in stock tonight and if they do, I'll note down what brand they are.


Might even go so far as to order a better output transformer for it too, that is, if they have one in stock at a good price.


Update:


Okay, I've settled on what brand of replacement valves I'll be ordering from Evatco, I'm going to go with Genalec Gold Lions for all three of the valves, there's a slight problem, Evatco don't sell individual Genalec Gold Lion EL84 valves, they sell them as a set of matched pairs, or a set of matched quads, the set of matched pairs only cost just over Au $60.00, I reckon that's quite reasonable, so I'll order a matched pair and I'll have one spare, and of course since I had a good experience with the Genalec Gold Lion ECC83 valves that I used as replacements in my Marshall amp, I'll order another two of them as well, but not this coming fortnight.


In the meantime, the valves installed in the amp will do fine.

Update:

I thought that I would go ahead and take a few more pics of my Legacy amp, but this time take some of the cabinet insides:


Firstly here's a closeup pic of the repairs I made to the amp's power transformer, there were two orange wires and two blue wires that had white plastic inline fuse holders, these fuse holders were broken so that the fuses fell out, you can see where I have placed some black heatshrink insulation on them, indicating where the fuse holders were originally, this restored normal operation of the amp, and it has never given me any trouble ever since, it's been a very reliable amp so far:

Attachment 19764


Next is a pic of the insides of the amp's cabinet, you can see a small gold-coloured object to the right of the two silver cylinders, that's the output transformer, I'm thinking of swapping it out for a bigger one since these small output transformers tend to have a limited frequency response, and also tend to be not as efficient, still, it seems to work okay with the 8 Ohm / 35 Watt Jensen C10Q speaker I put in it, which definitely made a big difference to the tone of the amp:

Attachment 19765


And lastly, here's a closeup pic of the three valves that are installed in the amp, the two smaller ones are a couple of Marshall ECC83 valves, while the larger one is a Russian made Sovtek EL84/6BQ5 Power Pentode:

Attachment 19766


Sorry about the graininess of the pics, been trying lots of times to get the picture quality to be a bit better but so far I haven't succeeded, I guess I could try using my Samsung Galaxy Y phone, but the pic quality isn't really much better, I'll definitely have to seriously think about investing in a better digital camera soon, but for now I'll have to make do with what I have in the meantime.


Anyway, I do remember doing some mods to the amp not long after doing the repairs to the amp's power transformer, I tested it out after I fixed it and noticed that the amp was a bit hummy, I wanted the amp to be useful as a studio recording amp so I decided to try replacing the stock filter caps in the power supply in order to reduce the hum, I think I used one 100uF/400V DC Electrolytic cap, and two 47uF/450V DC Electrolytic caps, which I bought from my local Jaycar Electronics store, replacing the stock caps with the new ones did seem to get rid of the hum, and the amp is much quieter, you can barely hear any hum even when the amp is turned up to full volume and with the gain control on full, so I'm happy with it.

cool old amp Doc. Enjoy

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Originally Posted by stan

cool old amp Doc. Enjoy

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Cheers mate, and I agree, for what it is it is actually not a bad little amp at all, perhaps it could serve as a kind of template for the Pitbull Guitars amp.

Update:


Would you believe it, just when I said that my Legacy amp has been reliable, it stopped working, turns out one of the Marshall ECC83 valves went faulty and I could see a blue glow coming from within it, so I quickly switched the amp off, pulled out the faulty valve, then replaced it with a known good one, that got the amp working again.....thank goodness for that.


Seems to be all good now, hopefully it stays that way.....lol.


Update 2:

Just out of curiosity, I decided to try the faulty Marshall ECC83 valve in my Baja Real Tube Overdrive pedal just to be sure that it was faulty, and yes it was indeed faulty, I also tried the other Marshall ECC83 valve and although it worked, the gain it produced was a bit low, so I reckon it's on the way out to going faulty, the funny thing is that the two Marshall ECC83 valves were the original stock preamp valves installed in my Marshall MA100C amp when I bought it brand new, and they were installed in it when the Marshall amp was blowing fuses, so, I reckon what happened was that the two Marshall ECC83 valves got a bit voltage-stressed while they were in my Marshall amp (the reason why the Marshall amp was blowing fuses in the first place was that the amp's power transformer was putting out too high HT (around 600V DC when it should have been only 450V DC) due to it being designed to run on 230 V AC rather than our Australian 240V AC supply), now the data sheets for an ECC83 valve quote a maximum anode/plate voltage of only about 300V DC, so yes indeed the two Marshall ECC83 Valves were getting voltage-stressed, no wonder one eventually failed and the other one is sounding a bit worn out.

Update:


At long last, here's an audio demo of my Legacy amp, it's in three parts, the first part is a recording of the amp set for a clean-ish kind of sound, the second part is a recording of the amp set to give an overdriven sound, so the distortion you hear is actually the amp's own generated distortion, and finally the third part is a recording with the amp set to the same settings as per the second part, but now I've used my Rangemaster Treble-Booster pedal to push the amp harder into overdrive, you can also hear how the pedal helps to get rid of the bass muddiness as well as make the amp sound with a bit more presence:

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/...Recordbg_2.mp3

Note that I had to lower the setting of the amp's Master Volume because I didn't want to disturb my neighbors, but hopefully you can get an idea of what sounds the amp is capable of delivering, when you max-out the Master Volume the overdrive does get smoother.

By the way, I was using my Gold Strat set to it's bridge pickup to record the demo.

Not too bad at all Doc, did you wind the amp back to a cleaner setting when you put the pedal in the chain, if not I'd be interested in hearing it

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Originally Posted by dave.king1

Not too bad at all Doc, did you wind the amp back to a cleaner setting when you put the pedal in the chain, if not I'd be interested in hearing it

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I actually had the amp's master volume set to about half way during the whole of the recording, I was recording the amp demo at night so I had to keep the volume down so that I wouldn't disturb my neighbors , to compensate for it, I needed to adjust the input level on my Focusrite Saffire Pro 40 so that I could still get a good recording level.

To further help things, I covered both the amp and the mic with a sleeping bag so that the mic would only pick up the sound of the amp and not any ambient sounds from the room or outside.

At full master volume setting, the amp does get very loud considering that it is only capable of putting out 5 Watts maximum, I'm not sure how efficient the Jensen C10Q speaker is though, but it does seem to make the amp pretty loud.

To get the clean sound, I kept the master volume set to half way and then I maxxed-out the setting of the gain control on the amp and reduced the volume control on the guitar till the amp sounded clean, for the next two parts in the demo I set the guitar's volume to full, but kept the master volume set to half-way, and then stomped on the Rangemaster pedal for the third part of the recording, the thing about the Legacy amp is that it doesn't actually have any channel switching in it, so you have to play with the settings of the gain and master volume controls in order to get different sounds out of it, but I reckon that it isn't a limitation of the amp since you're most likely going to set the amp for a specific sound and then use the guitar's volume to control it.