Pete B. wrote:strumminsix wrote:Does she sound a bit stiff? It looks like she's still got those suppression caps and resistors over the powertubes and the original lead dress.
You may wanna ask your tech about this. It's a fast job, should cost very little, and what 90% of techs call "blackfacing" when it really isn't.
Basically CBS changed the lead dress so there was this parasitic oscillation happening and they solved it with those suppression caps & resistors.
I will have it checked out. I have only messed around at low volume so far.
When people say "Blackfacing" I always think that they mean they mod it so it "breaks-up at a lower volume"... where-as I am a "clean to the top" player, on both Pedal Steel and Guitar.
Using the pre-amp-tap. it starts to break up around 7.5 (7 sounds pretty sweet)... the 9-10 range is kinda too distort-o for me.
I will also have him put in the "click-in/out" pot to remove the Tremelo circuit from the primary signal path.
fwiw, this amp has a great sounding Tremelo circuit.
Anyone want to buy a nice Alembic F2B?
(I will list later this week in Garage Sale section).
BF'ing will get you 100 different answers depending on who you ask. The purist will say it brings everything back to PRE-CBS AB763 spec.
I am not a purist.
However, when I got my 68 (with aluminum trim), I brought it to my tech and we talked it being a bit stiff and then I asked about BF'ing. He then explained to me about bringing it back 100% to pre-CBS but cautioned that with amp designs all changes have a waterfall impact, etc, etc. He then advised that the only thing really "wrong" with these amps is that CBS was doing such a poor job with the lead dress that the amps were getting this parasitic oscillation that kinda sounds like your ear is up to a sea shell (I knew this sound from my few RI's I returned) so instead of fixing the lead dress they put these suppression caps and resistors over the poweramp tubes which eliminated the P.O., gave it a smidge more headroom but also made them more stiff almost like cold poweramp tubes.
He removed those on my amp, cleaned up the lead dress and it was night and day better. It stayed clean up to about 6 with humbuckers. We then played with the bias a bit to get "my sound" and now about 6 she just is not clean anymore but not OD'ing. Somewhere just past pristine clean.
This is my strong recommendation, dude, for me it opened her up from what could sound like a SS amp to a perfectly tuned tube amp.