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So weird this comes up right after I looked into Brian May :) and the Heath love...







I know I looked into May's sound before but needed a refresher. Ive personally thought the sound May makes with his guitar is some of the greatest "tone" and overdrive Ive ever heard in a guitar sound. Read the wiki page last night and relearned ;) he almost exclusively uses a modded, by him, VOX AC30TRX with all the circuitry stripped out other than its clean channel. Then keeps it wide open and uses a home made, again by him, overdrive pedal and lastly his home made (must I say it) by him, guitar. I believe all AC30s are PPP EL84. To each his own but that clean, sustaining, over driven sound of his simply tops my list of badass sound. It was cool to read there how Steve Vai says May is one of his favs and is one guitarist he simply cant copy the sound of. Never tire of his wails on Love of My Life and Millionaire Waltz.

Sorry for my long winded waxing...

First off I couldnt agree with Airtime more. I like to give many folks in this forum the benefit of the doubt they know this and will act accordingly. However many also dont. Refurbing an old tube amp is a must. Folks can debate about the stability and sound of older coupling caps. Very common in the guitar scene. But doing a power supply rebuild is a must at min. And many of the old carbon resistors are failing in many ways too. Then even the core circuit itself can leave things to be desired. Which brings me to...

It was cool to see all the love for the old Heathkit iron. I couldnt agree more. I have this old AA-151 which was completely overhauled by Don Allen. Ive written about it here before. But its input circuit was a bad design. It would pass all line signals through a needless gain stage just incase it was the phono input and the rest just got chopped back down. Amongst a few other things. All this and more was touched up by Don. Great amp now. Has deep bass like I rarely hear from such a low power tube amp. But again, it got a MUCH needed overhaul before real use. Also I believe this and the other mentioned Heath EL84 amps use the same output transformer. They sure look like it and I recall reading many did. Have a rougher 151 and its older smaller black chassis version too. Id like to pull the iron and have a power amp made out of it.

Cant speak for many other vintage EL84 amps but these Heaths sure sound damn good to my ears.

Fun read.

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