| Audio | |
| We love the sound of tube amplifiers! And certainly there will be a tube amp in the foreseeable future made by us. But tubes have some disadvantages in addition to their positive sound characteristics: size, mechanical sensitivity, power consumption, heat generation, wear, costs, etc ... Already today the difficult procurement of high quality tubes is a nuisance. And the NOS madness (... very close to the capacitor voodoo ...) we do not even want to indulge. It would be relatively easy to develop a tube amplifier and build. Practically all tube amplifier concepts are still based on the applications of RCA, GEC or Mullard from the 50s and 60s of the last century. And there is not much to improve on their tonal qualities today. An overdriven tube amp always sounds good, as long as you do not make any gross mistakes in the design. But just building the hundredth Fender, Marshall, or Vox clones ... there are more interesting tasks. For example, to develop a semiconductor-based amplifier, which of course has to be able to cope with the tube competition. Semiconductor, because it circumvents some of the aforementioned drawbacks of tubes while always keeping in mind that the sound of an overdriven tube amp is practically the reference to achieve. And do not you find with many tube users such a small green box in front of the amp (... and whose name promises a screaming tube sound ...)? And there are only semiconductors in it! Nevertheless, it often determines the sound of the entire other (tube) system significantly, and probably positive, otherwise you would not use it. When designing a guitar amplifier using semiconductors, you can now choose between two signal processing options: analog or digital (... or as a third option mixing analog and digital ...). The digital way of "modeling" or "profiling" known (tube) amps and reproducing their sound as "lifelike" as we can, can not, in our opinion, be the solution for a musician looking for his "own" sound , I'd rather buy the original right now! Nobody needs hundreds of different amp models or sounds anyway. And always the anxious thought: "... does that really sound exactly like ...?" Or Class D? Some people call Class-D "analog". To chop a guitar signal into zeros and ones of different lengths, but as far as possible rectangular, to operate a switch and then to smooth everything back with a low-pass filter, is not, in our understanding, "analog". Take the distortion circuit from the small green box, class-D power amp behind and ready ... Shudder, the signal of my beautiful guitar made of fine wood, with its own character and soul, should be chopped up and then reassembled painstakingly? Nah, we do not want that ... But if it should be already semiconductors, then at least an alibi precursor tube with install? And in the case for a window, so that everyone can see? We work with tubes! And if it does not light enough, we make another LED behind it ... Let's leave it to others. By the way, despite all the enthusiasm for the various amp concepts: The speaker used is an essential sound factor, perhaps even the most important. Long story short, our approach looks like this : We have developed a (almost) purely analog amplifier (... our hall is also digital at the moment ...) and as a "modern" alternative to the tube set to field effect transistors. Only JFETs are used in the pre-stages, in the final stage MOSFETs work, each in a partly new and unusual circuit technology. Operational amplifiers in the signal path are deliberately omitted, the JFETs should add their own overtones as possible in each stage. As a not insignificant factor for a good sound, we consider the use of an output transformer. By the way, this results in an optimal adaptation to different speaker impedances. We also invested a lot of development work in the power supply. The whole thing is "rounded off" by a microprocessor control, which basically takes care of the optimal and trouble-free operation of the individual stages. As with all our products, it was important for us to maintain and support the sound of the connected instrument, and the amplifier should become part of the instrument. We can not do high-gain, but there are enough pedals for that. Our amplifiers are not handwired single pieces with strictly square wires, noisy carbon press resistors and orange voodoo capacitors. We rely on SMD technology where possible, wired components where necessary (for example, the film capacitors), board construction with high quality components, developed and manufactured entirely in Germany. JESS, the name is program... |
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