R.G. Keen has an amp series coming out

[Pedal love]

RG, I'm sure they're great and I can't wait to hear one.pl

[Somicide]

These seem really sweet... I'd love to see one soon!

PnL,

Jeff

[ExpAnonColin]

Let me first say I'm extremely excited about this-they sound like they'd be great, and I needed a nice tube practice amp to replace my VS30R for my prototyping... the 30 watt amp looks pretty nice for this purpose, especially after how you describe it.  My Peavey classic 50 does nice for my normal amp, as far as keeping it clean and all.

But I have to say in all honesty and in the nicest way, these amps are hideous.  I feel like I am in Best Buy looking at subwoofers with ecstacy popping rap-heads.  The cone idea is very cool, but it totally just looks like the kind of thing you'd find in a souped up honda with the windows rattling.  Not that I would ever let the looks of an amp or pedal turn me away from buying it, just a critical guy's opinion

-Colin

[Fret Wire]

One thing that's really fairly ground breaking is the speaker grilles. Those chrome hubcap looking things are actually treble dispersers. I hate beamy speakers - speakers where if you walk off the centerline of the speaker the treble drops off. That's caused by the physics of the cone motion and the wavelength of sounds in air.

Nice touch. Sure beats the old fashioned method of using a narrow piece of duct tape across the grill for treble dispersion. I caught that the minute I saw the pic. The features seem real nice, but the emphasis on reliability really impresses me. PCB's have always had the potential to be reliable in amps, but cost concerns always seem to win out. Great to see you've been designing for someone who's willing to go for it. It would be nice to see a mass produced amp that will go for 30-40 years with basically only a cap job needed, maintainance wise. Just like our favorite old amps.

I'm curious, on the cathode resistors, bypass caps, and such, are the voltage and wattage rating specs for those certain components high enough to allow good longevity? One thing that always annoyed me about the Fenders was the cut-it-way-too-close ratings on their cathode resistor wattage and bypass cap ratings. Always leads to failure, not mojo.

With regard to jacks, the amp has to meet certain safety codes for the CE approval, correct? My understanding was Fender had to use the pcp mounted Reann (correct spelling?) jacks to meet specs, instead of using open frame Switchcrafts or comparable brands. Maybe to meet export specs? The Fender jacks constantly need replacing, not due to solder joint failure, but internal jack tension failure. What did you end up using in this amp.

Kudos to you and Bob for what sounds like an awesome design!

[CS Jones]

You use a 30 watt amp as a practice amp?
Wow...
I gig barroom style in the range of 30 or so times a year mostly with my tried and true '66 Princeton reworked with 6L6s and a well worn 12" Mojotone speaker. Roughly 15 watts. The BF Twin and the Super are going on the block simply because my knees can't take hauling the weight anymore (they sit in the closet gathering dust)... even the 66 Pro doesn't see much use because it's 40 watt rating is overkill for what I need to do.

these amps are hideous

Naw...no way. "Hideous" is when your wife starts looking like your mother-in-law.
Looks to me like the form simply follows the function here. As stated, a main intention here is to take a licking and to keep on ticking. No grill cloth to replace. Given the info on the grill's sonic intent it's no wonder the shape is such.
I'm with Tom...I am SO all over it.

[black mariah]

You use a 30 watt amp as a practice amp?
Wow...
I gig barroom style in the range of 30 or so times a year mostly with my tried and true '66 Princeton reworked with 6L6s and a well worn 12" Mojotone speaker. Roughly 15 watts. The BF Twin and the Super are going on the block simply because my knees can't take hauling the weight anymore (they sit in the closet gathering dust)... even the 66 Pro doesn't see much use because it's 40 watt rating is overkill for what I need to do.

I use a 100 watt Carvin through two 4x12's IN MY BEDROOM. 30 watts is nothing.

[Ben N]

But it does have some common sense things - thick PCB stock, well supported mechanically. An access cover so you can get to both sides of the PCB if you do need to replace parts without removing the board or the controls from the chassis. Protection against faults killing your transformers. Transient suppressors to catch high voltage glitches before they kill the amp, tubes or transformers. Soft power on to stretch some more life out of the tubes. Things like that.

Awesome!

It's really a simple amp in concept. The extras all went into things that will make it play better and last longer. That was a hot button with me. But reliability features are hard to sell. How do you demonstrate longevity to a customer with a brand new amp? They have to trust you enough to pay extra for a "reliable" amp and they won't see the value for their money for years. That's a tough sell.  We had to be sure that the mix of "right-now" features was enough to justify the price, and hope that the reliability stuff proves itself over the years.

Nah, it's simple:  Just sell them a typical modern Fender, Ampeg, Laney or other non-boutique production tube amp, with the pcb mounted jacks, switches & pots, if not tube sockets, the inadequate power supplies, the vibration issues, the cheap cabinetry, blah, blah, blah..., have them play a few gigs, and just wait for the problems to start cropping up. They'll come around to reliability as a feature right quick enough.  "Specially us old farts still toting around our 40-year old amps, thinking that a service issue is where you need to re-cap after only 15 years...

One thing that's really fairly ground breaking is the speaker grilles. Those chrome hubcap looking things are actually treble dispersers. I hate beamy speakers - speakers where if you walk off the centerline of the speaker the treble drops off. That's caused by the physics of the cone motion and the wavelength of sounds in air.

The fancy grilles have an internal cone that was selected by listening tests to spread the trebles back out. Bob came up with those. Same concept as Weber's Beam Blockers, horn phasing plugs, and a history of treble diffusers going back decades. But I think this is the first time they looked this good 8-) - and the first time on a production amp that I know of.

That is a fantastic idea, and, like you say, a real forehead slapper--why hasn't anyone done that before, especially since Weber has been selling those Beam Blockers for a while, not to mention all the duct tape people have put on the insides of their grillcloth.

Bravo, RG!

Ben

[ExpAnonColin]

You use a 30 watt amp as a practice amp?


Naw...no way. "Hideous" is when your wife starts looking like your mother-in-law.

Sure I do.  I rarely overdrive my tubes.  Just my style.

Hideous was an overstatement, an exaggeration, and in my post I agreed that function clearly overtook form.  But someone needs to poke fun at the space-age speaker grills

-Colin

[petemoore]

With that standout Image, Product identification is a Sure Thing.
 Placed in a showroom, probably be put in the 'high end buyer' tube amp section, will certainly attract curiousity/comment...same thing if seen/heard on stage.
 Amps that use 6L6 and EL34 are quite different sounding, popular for guitar amp output sections.
 Ability to utilize 2 different types of tubes     [two 'very available types]. That's Really cool.
 Looks like a really well designed guitar amp.

[Doug_H]

Looks nice, R.G.

Good luck!

Doug

[WGTP]

I love the hub cap's, whether they work or not.  In line with the hub cap concept, I think a variety of designs should be offered (are they chrome?).  Just look in a car magazine at all the different rim designs.  Spinners could be used to create a neo-leslie effect.  Different colors and materials that resonate at various frequencies.  Hey, I can start a line of accesories.  :twisted:

I'm no visual designer, but other aspects of the amp "look" should be done to match the hubcap theme.  Matching knobs and graphics along with corners, feet, handle, etc.  What about the corporate logo?  I love Retro/Tekno themes.

I know the new Celestion with the neodymnium magnets are expensive, but the light weight and high effeciency would be good selling points.   :roll:

[RDV]

No top box version?

RDV

[vanhansen]

WGTP, funny you mentioned the spinners.  I was thinking the same thing, and the effect it would produce.  Could you imaging the designs that could be done?  

R.G., this looks great.  Can't wait to try one.  How does it sound when breaking up?  From your description of clean (hear the tubes and hear the guitar) I'm thinking that with EL34's the breakup would be somewhere along the lines of an overdriven Plexi?  Maybe?  Am I on the right track?

[EdJ]

Great ideas,good luck!
Greetings,Ed

[putrefusion]

WGTP, funny you mentioned the spinners.  I was thinking the same thing, and the effect it would produce.  Could you imaging the designs that could be done?  

R.G., this looks great.  Can't wait to try one.  How does it sound when breaking up?  From your description of clean (hear the tubes and hear the guitar) I'm thinking that with EL34's the breakup would be somewhere along the lines of an overdriven Plexi?  Maybe?  Am I on the right track?

With all this talk of clean, I would imagine more of a JTM45 or fender-bassman-turned-marshall type of sound.  

Very cool product, good luck RG!

p.s. toroidal trannies in a tube amp?  gasp! I pity the pocketbook of anybody who blows one...  :lol:

[R.G.]

You guys are great! Thanks!

I'm an old hand at getting products moved from design to manufacturing from my previous life. That's both good news and bad news.

To re-use an old malapropism, the bad news is that the good news *is* the bad news.

I'm excruciatingly aware of all the pitfalls that lurk in the path from the drawing board to the dealer's show room. If I didn't know that much about it, I'd be ecstatic. What I have butterflies about now is the actual execution of the design. The best design in the world won't help if you can't get them made exactly that way, first time, every time. So I'm working that path hard. I've still got room to mess it up  

Hitting a couple of the questions:

But I have to say in all honesty and in the nicest way, these amps are hideous. I feel like I am in Best Buy looking at subwoofers with ecstacy popping rap-heads. The cone idea is very cool, but it totally just looks like the kind of thing you'd find in a souped up honda with the windows rattling.

That's a perfectly fair comment.  We did a lot of talking about what to make the things look like, and it varied from flat black hidden behind grille cloth to what you see here. It was not an easy choice. In the end, we decided that we'd like it to look different from the other hundred two-twelves-in-a-box combos, and that if it was going to look different, we should make it look WAY different. Some people will think it looks good, some will think it's truly ugly. Both are valid opinions to the owners, and I'm not insulted at all. I do appreciate hearing honest opinions. Thank you for your candor.

But someone needs to poke fun at the space-age speaker grills

They sure do. I admit to some initial queasy moments walking down the aisle at my local stereo distributor. But the form-follows-function argument that was mentioned finally got me. The more I look at them, the better I like them. This is, after all, not your father's @ldsm@bile.

:!: Hey... how about if we take red, green and blue LEDs and mount them where they're semi-invisible behind the support posts of the grille spider, and hook them up to a low-voltage color organ circuit in the amp? Amp front has a light show all on its own as you play...  :shock:

I'm curious, on the cathode resistors, bypass caps, and such, are the voltage and wattage rating specs for those certain components high enough to allow good longevity? One thing that always annoyed me about the Fenders was the cut-it-way-too-close ratings on their cathode resistor wattage and bypass cap ratings. Always leads to failure, not mojo.

I've had friends with Fender amps that smoked components. Bad juju.

I did not have a pre-set budget for components other than to pick good ones and not buy the gold plated mil-spec stuff. It's designed using the same process that selected resistors for some very large mainframe computers. I **hope** I got the math right and did reasonable deratings. If not, the parts will be changed to more substantial ones. I still have some prototypes coming to abuse to find out stuff like that. In the electronics-manufacturing-biz, protos intended for such uses are referred to as "victims"...  :twisted:

With regard to jacks, the amp has to meet certain safety codes for the CE approval, correct? My understanding was Fender had to use the pcp mounted Reann (correct spelling?) jacks to meet specs, instead of using open frame Switchcrafts or comparable brands. Maybe to meet export specs?

I'm a little confused there. To the best of my knowledge, safety approval has not much to do with input jacks. It's possible that there is part of the safety code I missed, but those two things don't have any connection that I know of. Rean PCB mount jacks have been a problem in some applications, but don't know of a safety advantage.

Yes, we're going to meet US and international safety codes.

The Fender jacks constantly need replacing, not due to solder joint failure, but internal jack tension failure. What did you end up using in this amp.

We're using the same brand of jacks that have been reliable in the Visual Sound effects pedals for years, because Visual Sound has the experience with the maker and supplier. In the early years before I started work with them, I understand that there were some jacks problems that they've worked out and not they're not a problem in the effects anymore. That's a good indicator for the amps, I think.

Oh, I forgot to mention. The jacks and controls are NOT PCB mounted. They're soldered to the PCB on lead wires. No PCB solder joint failures here.

No top box version?

Sorry, no. When we've sold enough to recoup development and startup costs, maybe that can get revisited. For right now, only combos.

toroidal trannies in a tube amp? gasp! I pity the pocketbook of anybody who blows one...

I worried about that during the design. It turns out that toroids don't *have* to cost more than EI's if you are conservative in design and find the right suppliers. With care, you can get to rough parity in price.  Besides, as I said, it's my firm belief that it's going to be difficult to blow one. It's protected against all but one of the scenarios I can think of to kill a power transformer that is not already defective.

That single scenario is quite rare, and expensive to protect against. It fell outside the bounds of being practical to protect against. My failure rate model projects that we'll have 0.6 failures like that per thousand amps over a twenty year amp life. It didn't make sense to me to make everyone pay for the protection.

Toroids have some real advantages. They start out using one third to one half of the iron and copper of an EI transformer of equal power rating, so you have a big materials savings up front. The thing that used to make toroids expensive was that they had to be hand wound. No more. There are now effective machine winders for toroids. That's why toroid suppliers are starting to push their wares. They still have the "toroids are more expensive and better" idea out in the public mind, but they're close to EIs on cost. Good business if you can get it.

[Mark Hammer]

The aspect I find most interesting here is the notion of a manufacturer somewhere in between "big name" and "boutique" (I think that's a fair comment, given the type of market penetration VS has) making reliability and durability and serviceability a product feature.

The implication is that, should the product line be successful (and I hope it is), more companies will also pick up on that aspect, and try and implement it in their lines.

Build quality - a fad sweeping the nation.  Who'd have thunk it?   :lol:  :wink:  Mazeltov, there, buddy.

[Fret Wire]

I'm a little confused there. To the best of my knowledge, safety approval has not much to do with input jacks. It's possible that there is part of the safety code I missed, but those two things don't have any connection that I know of. Rean PCB mount jacks have been a problem in some applications, but don't know of a safety advantage.
Yes, we're going to meet US and international safety codes.

Who wouldn't be confused the way I worded that. :oops: I found the thread I was trying to  remember correctly. It's basically a ground issue with most newer design amps, that's all.
http://p210.ezboard.com/fampworkshopfrm2.showMessage?topicID=724.topic

But, there was this safety concern with open frame jacks, I don't know if it is a code or just a safety practice on the manufacturers part:

Sam Marshall added "another interesting thing, however, is that occasionally we have to install barriers so a metal probe (a coat hanger, for example) cannot be inserted into the open frame jack and touch a high voltage. This problem does not exist with most plastic jacks".

Sorry for the questions, but the development work between the prototypes and the manufacturing line fascinate me. It's where dreams can come to reality , or be reduced to reality. :cry:  

Once again, I'm beyond impressed with this line of amps.    As for the treble dispersion grills, cool ideas will always grow on you, looks wise.  Blocks beer bottles pretty good too I bet. :twisted:

[object88]

I didn't want to bring it up in my first post, since I really like what you're doing, but I agree with ExpAnonColin about the "hubcaps".  So I looked at the pdf again, and here's my recommendation: make the color of the center of the hubcap match the color of the plate above the speakers.  This will do wonders, really.  

I'm a little conservative when it comes to color schemes, IMHO, and the blue in the center of the hubcap clashes with the red-brown of the "Workhorse" logo plate.  I feel that 4 distinct colors is "too many" for an object.  One can be too monochromatic (but not always), two is good, three is also good, four is overkill.  So you have the color of the "body", in this case, black.  You have the color of the controls and hubcap: silver.  Then you have the hubcap center and the logo plate... the two colors don't match, much less in the same temperature, etc.  Fix that up, and your style points will go through the roof.  Or, at least, up.  

If I can yammer on a little longer about this... I think there are a lot of good examples of my "three-color-rule".  MyPalm PDA is black, dark silver, and various complementary shades of green.  My computer moniter is beige (including the control panel), with a red logo and a small green power-indicator light.  A Marshall head is (often) black with a bronze faceplate, silver knobs and logo, and a mildly distracting red light.  A Fender Hot Rod is black with silver grill, logo, and controls, and an elegant light.

Just my two cents.  

[R.G.]

I'm a little conservative when it comes to color schemes, IMHO, and the blue in the center of the hubcap clashes with the red-brown of the "Workhorse" logo plate. I feel that 4 distinct colors is "too many" for an object. One can be too monochromatic (but not always), two is good, three is also good, four is overkill. So you have the color of the "body", in this case, black. You have the color of the controls and hubcap: silver. Then you have the hubcap center and the logo plate... the two colors don't match, much less in the same temperature, etc. Fix that up, and your style points will go through the roof. Or, at least, up.

Those are all good points. I'll make sure that they will get looked at. I appreciate the time taken to get the concepts across. I *knew* there was a reason I went into engineering instead of industrial design!!  

Sorry for the questions, but the development work between the prototypes and the manufacturing line fascinate me. It's where dreams can come to reality  , or be reduced to reality.  

Don't be sorry - it is indeed a fascinating part of product development. Both sides of the transition are pretty well known. In the middle is best labeled "Here be dragons" like old maps.

But, there was this safety concern with open frame jacks, I don't know if it is a code or just a safety practice on the manufacturers part:

Ah! Got it. That does make sense. I hadn't thought about a concern with someone using a piece of wire in the jack. I'm basing my hole-poking safety on the UL "safety finger". This is a tapered nylon instrument about eight inches long with three pivot joints and a wire through it to a metal contact at the pointy end. The pointy end is small, like a childs finger. The idea is that if you can touch dangerous voltages with the conductor by poking it into any opening on the unit and using any combination of the hinges, it's unsafe.

A 1/4" jack is too small to get the finger into farther than the end of the jack, so I hadn't worried about it. I'll do some research and find out if the safety guys are now saying any wire through any hole. Thanks for the pointer.

WGTP, funny you mentioned the spinners. I was thinking the same thing, and the effect it would produce. Could you imaging the designs that could be done?

Apparently that's the first thing *everyone thinks of*. When my wife first saw the artist's renditions, she immediately said "Hey, why don't you get some of those spinning hub caps like on the low riders?"

We may have come *too* close to hubcaps!