Crate V18-112 update

Well, my wife says that I can never own anything for more than a month
before taking it apart, and this time I proved her wrong -- it took me
2 months to get around to messing with my little crate.

As I wrote earlier, I've been really impressed with it. Sounds
decent. Reasonably light. not too bad looking. I've been using it
daily, and contrary to some reports I've read, it has yet to burst
into flames.

However, as is the case with many amps, it has way more overdrive than
I'm ever likely to use, so I decided to experiment with swapping out
the first preamp tube (12AX7), and replacing it with the lower gain
5751.

First thing I discovered (actually, I had read about this 'feature')
was that there's virtually no way to get at the tubes without removing
the amp chassis. First, the back cover is held in place with 8 screws,
then 4 more from the sides to release the chassis. A pain in the ass,
definitely, but not too onerous, given the light weight of the
chassis.

Inside it pretty much looks like any other PCB amp. I've no doubt the
pots and caps and all other components are the cheapest available, but
it's neatly assembled, and due to the basic simplicity of the circuit,
shouldn't be too difficult to service.

As others have observed, it does use solid state op-amps to drive the
reverb and the line-out. I'm not that much of a purist as to be
unduely bothered by a little silicon with my glass.

Once it was reassembled, I found that the result was definitely more
consistant with my playing style. You can still get plenty of grind,
but you have to turn the gain control quite a bit further. It feels as
if you have a bit more control of the nuances of the overdrive with
the lower-gain tube.

Now I'm going to have to pick one up for my Sundown.

Joe
http://www.rootwerx.com
.

Relevant Pages

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