What do you think about Fender silver face amps? Better years than others?
What do you think about Fender silver face amps? Better years than others?
If we'd known we were going to be the Beatles, we'd have tried harder.--George Harrison
my first amp was a '72-'73 Princeton Reverb bought new, I had that amp for 32 years. Only sold it so I could stay home with my dad while he underwent cancer treatment. I wish I had both of them.
There's probably a delineating point somewhere in the later '70s, as PCB started making their way into the manufacturing point. As did master volumes on some other models and/or pull boost on tone controls. Once they started adding all that crap, tone and reliability seemed to have started sliding downhill.
"Live and learn and flip the burns"
I love them because up until the mid '70s they were nearly identical to their higher-priced blackfaced progenitors, but so much cheaper! The circuit changes occurred with the bigger amps first, & then trickled down the the smaller models. So you can find a '76 Champ or Deluxe that will sound basically the same as one ten years older
I wondered about them because of all the talk about the CBS era. My bandmate buddy had a Twin made sometime between 78-80. He played a Gibson 175, a Les Paul Custom, and a 3-bolt Strat through it, and I thought it sounded great. I think my 08 DRRI sounds great, and musicians and audience members have often complimented it. But I also know that it's machine wired and has PCB. How does something like that affect sound? And from what I've read on this forum, the components are cheaper made, easier to fail. I know I can find opinions on the web, but I respect the knowledge of you guys who are still here or who are new here.
If we'd known we were going to be the Beatles, we'd have tried harder.--George Harrison
I can't speak to the sound issue, but reliability & ease of repair are the reasons I prefer not to use amps that have PCBs.
In the '70s there were actual changes made in the circuitry of these amps that were bad (imo) apart from the move to PCBs
The short answer is, the silverface models from the 1968 model year (which actually began to appear in the spring of 1967) are the preferred amps. All of them were still manufactured to blackface specs (original circuit revisions, hand-built with cloth push-back wire, and all-pine cabinet construction). The nefarious circuit tampering by CBS's "engineers" began in the spring of 1968, resulting in degradation of tone and, in some cases, reduced power output. Much of this meddling was reversed by 1970 although this was the last year for Leo's original cabinet construction. Subsequent amps featured cabs with lap-joined corners, glued-in baffle boards fabricated from MDF, and velcro-affixed grill frames. Electronically, many of the amps got the master-volume control and later, the worthless push-pull boost switch. The smaller "student" models of the silverface era (Champ/Vibrochamp, Princeton/Princeton Reverb, and Deluxe Reverb) escaped most of the design "upgrades" to their circuitry and remained as intended though the furniture was cheapened just as with the more expensive models. There are no PCB's in any of these amps -- a skilled and knowledgeable technician can backdate most of the later silverface amps to original blackface specs. And durable, all-pine enclosures are available from a number of aftermarket vendors. Thus, it's relatively easy to get the original blackface tone for a fraction of the blackface price.
"When injustice becomes law then rebellion becomes duty."
Thank you, Rog. I was hoping you'd weigh in on this.
My buddy's mid-late 70's Twin sounded great; my mid-70's silverface Bassman 50 was dead. It died at the beginning of a gig. Died.
If we'd known we were going to be the Beatles, we'd have tried harder.--George Harrison
Roger knows