All My Steel Guitar Amps Have Become Horse & Buggy

[James Quackenbush]

Hi David,
Thanks for the information on this effect set up ..... yeah while I have a bunch of different amplifiers I enjoy working with computer oriented effects also .... it’s all good .... The more the merrier !!

[Jerry Overstreet]

I suppose this is the wave of the future? It does seem that technological advances are allowing for much compactness and down-sizing.

I just don't know if I'm going to get the characteristics and dynamics I get from my personally tweaked conventional rigs. It may be that I'll be finding out sooner than later as my big stereo rig is planted at the rehearsal room as I can hardly drag it around anymore. A shame to have many years and dollars invested in gear that's becoming prohibitive to handle due to years, mass and weight.

I dunno, I may be done with pedal steel and it's complements...we'll see...but if not, it appears electronics such as this may be in my future.

[James Quackenbush]

I’m a keyboard player by trade, and this type of technology or similar was done through sampling....Samples of the actual instruments were recorded, put together, and you have the sound of the actual instrument....A lot of these programs take many GB’s on a computer to run....I think that more often than not, these programs and computers are used more in the studio than live....A comment was made “your amp could blow a transformer “ .... You still need an amp to amplify the samples, or in the case of these guitar programs, they need to be amplified.....The variety is endless, the cost is fabulous, but the load times and all the figitting is very time consuming....It’s like going to an ice cream parlor that has 50 flavors....You know you like vanilla or chocolate because you’ve eaten them all your life, BUT NOW you have 48 more flavors to pick from....Now you have to narrow things down by reading all the flavors....This all takes time....Lord knows I’ve had FAR MORE issues with my computer’s over the years than I have with my amplifier’s....There’s give and take to all of it....In a lot of cases I find myself sitting down and playing acoustic instruments to get away from technology....We live in a fabulous age whereby we have these choices.....Variety IS th spice of life !

[David Mitchell]

Right guys! Just think of a home computer as a modern customizable Profex unit with sampling/amp modeling as a bonus.
After all a Peavy Profex IS a computer. It has a cpu processor inside it working algorithms and rearranging 1's and zeros. If you ever had a Peavy Profex on stage you had a computer on stage. It's just rack mounted with a tiny, tiny screen.

[David Mitchell]

What Peavy needs to build now is extremely efficient and lightweight raw speakers and they have the money to figure it out. Something like a black widow that weighed no more than a pound and didn't take much power to drive it. Altec and JBL managed to get efficiency in powerful speakers but they never could get the weight down. You would have to have something that could increase the magnetic pull of a little bitty magnet. As long as we have huge magnets we will always have heavy speakers. I also suggest building speaker cabs out of Paulownia wood to get the weight down even further.
If Peavy could do this then all we need is our computer for a preamp/interface and plug into the Peavy Ultra lightweight power amp/ speaker combo. The power amp part could have a drastic weight reduction by building it transformerless. The transformer is where the weight is at. You can easily build a 400 watt amp with no transformer. I use to have a Walter Woods amp that had the power of a Nashville 400 and weighed 2 lbs. and about the size of a regular church Bible.

[Scott Denniston]

Evidently Mark Knopfler is on the road using Kempers so I guess they can't be all that bad. His rack has 3 of them I assume just for him. I think the whole band uses Kempers.

[Greg Cutshaw]

A super light speaker would involve eliminating the permanent magnet structure and going back to using a field coil or electromagnet. With switching power supplies, the field coil driver circuit would be low cost, inexpensive and could add the capability of custom magnet settings even nonlinear ones!

The basics:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Field_coil_loudspeaker

I just repaired an amp that had a field coil speaker. Perhaps it's time to dust off this old technology or maybe a solid state transducer would make more sense.

We are overdue for the next revolution in speakers now that amps have evolved down to negligible weight and size.

[David Mitchell]

A super light speaker would involve eliminating the permanent magnet structure and going back to using a field coil or electromagnet. With switching power supplies, the field coil driver circuit would be low cost, inexpensive and could add the capability of custom magnet settings even nonlinear ones!

The basics:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Field_coil_loudspeaker

I just repaired an amp that had a field coil speaker. Perhaps it's time to dust off this old technology or maybe a solid state transducer would make more sense.


We are overdue for the next revolution in speakers now that amps have evolved down to negligible and size.

Hey that's a great idea!

[Ian Rae]

My father used to tinker with old radios - in fact as a boy in the 30s he built them from scratch. I'm sure some of those older sets had electromagnetic speakers. Surely with modern materials and techniques they could live again.