This is a Carlsbro TC60 Twin Valve combo I bought off a very nice man in Wigan for a hundred pounds. Carlsbro are pathologically helpfull when it comes to their vintage stuff and on receiving the serial number the man on the website quickly told me that this amp was made about midday on Thursday 10/5/1973 and who am i to disagree. It sound slightly less good than you'd think it would, very trebly and a bit harsh but not disasterous. They changed the design of the separate head version of this amp bit later in the seventies and what they came up with could win competitions in graphic design idiocy if ever they have such events which i doubt if they do. It has 2 EL34s, some ecc83s and a silicon rectifier if you're interested at all. And the original Bulgin plug. And two Celestion G12M 30watt speakers.Back to list
A Sound City 120 mk 4 head which is incredibly heavy and has 6 big output valves. Sound City are a strange make. Many people trying to sell them on eBay pretend that they're realy Hiwatts which are very expensive because the Who used to smash them up. This is based on the fact that someone who worked at Sound City knew someone who owned a Who album or something. They are not Hiwatts or anything like them , and one like this is worth about 250 quid or so because it's in very good nick with all its original knobs. They sound very nice and clean and warm like a christmas jumper.Back to list
AN RSC 'Bass Regent' amp head. Quite what this is or where it's from is not a subject on which i am qualified to comment. I bought it because it was very cheap and it has a GZ34 valve rectifier whatever that may be and it is all hand wired and if the dates on the components are to be believed was made in March 1964. It even works in a very loose sort of way and the outputs are tiny little holes labelled with mystifying impedance values. It may have been made in Stratford upon Avon by Ralph Richardson in between him giving his whatever he was there giving at the time. It sounds not very nice but that may be because it needs a good fettling. And who doesn't.Back to list
A Sound City Concord Combo from about 1972. Now this is an amp i am qualified to talk about as i've had it years, and sometime s you see these offered on eBay for large sums of money by people saying 'Hiwatt' a lot and making great play of the fact that it is an all valve british built hand wired amp. Beware of these people children, the Sound City Concord has one single virtue and that is that it is loud, very very loud. it sounds nasally harsh and horrible and no amount of tinkering and valve changing can do anything about it. Turned up full they have a certain brutal charm but anyone paying more than 150 pounds for one even in perfect condition is a silly sausage and wants a good talking to.Back to list
A Vox V125 lead head and cabinet. Now here's a thing, I bought the head bit of this set up on mad impulse as it was a bargain and had Vox on it so i was a bit over excited frankly. I then marvellously won a bid on a matching cabinet on eBay and brought the two together in a symbiosis of amp/cab togetherness. However, it didn't sound nearly as good as it's looks promised and even when the admirable Bernard Maughan of Maughan Amps sorted it out for me it still failed to thrill so i sold it at a big smug profit to the bloke who runs the Zuton's record label . It's an eighties made arrangement, with a PCB on which the valves are mounted and a five band equaliser which obviously seemed like a good idea at the time. The cabinet has two twelve inch speakers in it and a big bass reflex type gap at the bottom . It was the eighties. People were buying Japan's version of 'I second that emotion' and wearing bass guitars on their chests .Back to list
So i had this cabinet that needed doing up and when i did i dicovered it was a late 1970's Marshall 1960a 100watt affair crying out for a late 1970's 50 watt JMP mk 2 master volume head to go with it, and so i bought one off ebay is basically what happened. The front panel of this device had all the numbers rubbed off and so i bought a replacement one that fitted over the top of the original and was only momentarily tempted by the american vendor's also offered version with numbers that went up to 11 for that extra push over the cliff. The stack, for that's what it is, sounds like love, beauty and truth done in a valve amplifier / cabinet combination and who would have believed that Bletchley could produce such a thing as well as winning the war? Because it's a complete toilet of a place isn't it?. This amplification system what the Vox stack above was designed to challenge by all accounts and didn't .Back to list
A Carlsbro PA60 head. This is a fine looking piece of British design and sounds very good when you plug a guitar into it which is more than a Supermarine Spitfire or an Aston Martin does and they're always being touted as design icons on television programs about lists. Old Carlsbro valve amps are highly undervalued in my opinion. It's very similar in internal design to the combo featured earlier and if i'm honest sounds quite a bit nicer in a warm glowing type of way and has coloured knobs like the Sound City which may or may not be evidence of industrial espionage in the world of British consumer electronics in the early seventies who can say . It is sitting atop a 2X12 cabinet i built my self using my own power tools including a screwdriver which i managed to put through one of the cones of the speakers i had just fitted . You can repair speaker cones with runny pva glue and bits of cloth I then discovered and it appears to have no effect on the sound at all. Someone ( perhaps the man in Cheshire from whom i bought it ) has replaced the original bulgin plug with a kettle type mains connector that does nobody any good. I wish i could explain my urge to spend twenty quid putting an old one back in. The reverb wasn't something you'd want to spend a long time listening to though until a bloke called Martin fixed it for me and explained it was weirdly powered an in line resistor type thing that had blown, i glazed over a bit I'm afraid but now it sounds peachy these amps go for tiny amounts on eBay and are brilliant.Back to list
A 1972 ish or therabouts Fender Bassman fifty watt combo containing four ten inch speakers which you wouldn't think would sound as bassy as they do and which i live in fear of them blowing as they look difficult to replace. I got it in Birmingham from a bloke called Paul who knew Ranking Roger in his youth apparently and wanted a good camera which is why he was selling it. The amplifier is another example of the entirely beneficial sonic effect of refitting castors to combos that have had them removed for some reason. It is nice and loud and bassy and the only annoying thing is that the replacement valves I put in won't push right into the holders quite and can come loose if you wheel the thing over rough terrain for any length of time. you see these advertised on ebay as great guitar amps but i 've tried electric guitars through it and it doesn't sound too brilliant to me. They are a good buy as a bass amp however . i give it four stars . Out of five.Back to list
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