"The Tone Preserver is a dedicated line voltage reducer built to lower the voltage from your AC outlet to provide proper voltage for your beloved vintage amp that was built to run at 110 or 115v. It is heavy duty-built like a tank. I opened it up to see that it was neatly designed and beautifully built, definitely a labor of love. All of the labeling is done on black front plaques with engraved-looking white lettering and white sides. Very classy. Built in what looks like a military gray metal box with a large VU meter and a red chickenhead knob on the front, it’s decidedly simple to use." - Premier Guitar
vintagesoundworkbench.com/sho...
ToneQuest article where I first heard of the Tone-Preserver:
Perhaps you've heard how Eddie Van Halen used a variac to coax his vintage Marshall into those gloriously cocky ‘brown’ tones from his early recordings by knocking the voltage down to 90 VAC on his Marshall with a variac... As is so often the case in the music world, rumors of the Van Halen variac circulated like the clap among guitarists, some of whom got the story wrong, thinking that by really cranking a variac beyond 110 volts (more is better, right?) they would be delivered to electric Shangri-La post haste. As amps blew up, interest in variacs waned.
Other musicians who were at least grounded in a casual, street-wise understanding of physics had discovered that their amps indeed sounded better at slightly lower voltages than the typical 120VAC USA wall current, as Junior Watson sagely noted in our December 2006 ‘West Coast Blues’ cover story. Tonal considerations aside, working the aging components in a vintage amp at 120 volts when it was originally designed to run at 115 isn’t optimal either, and this fact was not lost on a tube hi-fi enthusiast in Illinois by the name of Carl Hartman. A guitarist friend of Carl’s who owns vintage amps had seen a voltage reduction circuit somewhere online, inspiring Carl to do some research of his own, since he had noticed that the transformers on his vintage Dynaco tube hi-fi amp would become hot enough to ‘fry an egg’ at today’s higher wall currents. Carl: “I found a design for reducing the line voltage in an ARRL manual - an Amateur Radio Relay League ham radio manual from around 1944-45. It is a fairly straightforward method of dropping the line voltage using a transformer. If you wire the transformer in phase with the current it will boost it by whatever the output of the transformer is, and if you wire it out of phase it will reduce it by the same amount. So I built this thing and tried it on the Dynaco and you could now put your hand on the transformer - it was running cooler, as designed. I talked with my guitar playing friends and while you can use a variac, they weigh a good twenty pounds, they aren’t really portable, and there is no volt meter, so you can’t see the actual voltage you’re drawing. My design for the Amp Preserver is a labor of love... I hand-machine the box, I have an assortment of chassis punches and it’s all hand-drilled and hand-punched, hand soldered and built like a rock.”
We agree. Carl’s little gray box is indeed built to last in ‘50s mil-spec style, but that’s not why you’ll want it. Sure, given a choice, none of us would choose to cook the original compo- nents in our vintage amps with five more volts than the 115 these amps were designed for (or the proper 105 VAC for British amps). Here in Atlanta, our line current is pegged at exactly 120, and we’ve heard that the line voltage in New York can exceed 125! Your vintage American amps were intended to ‘see’ 115, British amps 105, and the single chicken head knob on the Amp Preserver has three settings - ‘Line,’ which is your actual line current, 6, which will take our line current in Atlanta down to precisely 115, or -12, at 109. Comfortable in the knowledge that you are now no longer over-cooking yer precious babies, you’ll also experience a tonal benefit of impressive proportions... At 115 VAC our vintage Fender amps sound clearer and cleaner. No, not as in ‘lost’ distortion clean... the amps just sound clearer at all volume levels, and you’ll notice that a certain amount of trashy stuff lurking in the high frequencies when you overdrive the amp completely disappears at 115. You may not have noticed this trashy stuff... but you will when comparing the ‘Line’ and -6 settings as the clarity emerges. The net effect is not unlike the difference between a lot of current production ‘PAF’ hum buckers and vintage PAFs in terms of clarity and note separa- tion. It’s just a superior sound.
Now, Carl Hartman’s home workshop is no factory, so you may have to wait a bit to receive your Amp Preserver, but at $179, it is definitely an essential, must-have tool. We have ours rigged
with a surge protector/power strip that allows all of our amps to be connected to Carl’s box, which features a heavy duty on/off toggle switch on the back. Preserve and enjoy...TQ
8 июл 2020
