Possible Genesis of RangeMaster - FF - Tonebender from the mid 1950's?

[Pigyboy]

I am very interested to see what some of the historians think about this.

I bought this off Ebay a while back and looking thru it today


3rd printing by 1957 so let's say the first was printed around '55


I noticed this

Look kind of familiar?



Another one for fun - kinda Range Master-y


If you read the text they talk about using it as a mic preamp into a tube amp so it looks like someone was laying the ground work for all the fuzz to come. I'd love to hear what others think.

Chris

[Govmnt_Lacky]

Awesome find Chris! Thanks for sharing!! 

I am sure that breadboards are firing up as I type this 

[Pigyboy]

^^^
I really hope so!  That is how I think these mythical circuits were born - Someone saw these or similar designs and the rest is the history that we all want to know.

[teemuk]

Well, Rangemaster in bare essence isn't anything more fancy than a plain common emitter stage and the dual-transistor cascade with shunt feedback (Fuzz Face, Tone Bender etc.) is a perfect example of another classic textbook circuit - as you pretty much just learned. You can find a generous handful of books presenting those very basic designs. They are often even featured in the analog electronics books of today, of course just with more modern transistors.

There really isn't an infinite number of ways to build a transistor amp or a gain stage so it's not a marvel that most of them are based on a small handful of basic designs. With same principle you can certainly trace also about every tube amplifier out there back to Mullard, RCA, etc. designs.

Be also noted that the transistor books of that era contain the information that helped to create designs that resulted into ludicrous number of failing power amplifiers, temperamental circuits that stopped working on a hot stage or worked differently in and out chassis, designs that required precice transistor selection due to circuit's great dependancy on transistor's parameters, etc. Just to say, don't believe everything you read.  

[Jaicen_solo]

Agreed. Most of them don't take into account the fact that early transistors were mostly way off from the manufacturers specifications. The circuits were designed for the specified properties of the components, not taking into account leakage, variable gain etc..