Quote:
Originally Posted by screamin eagle
Is it possible that it just wasn't possible at this time to make a 10-20 watt all clean amp? Maybe they just weren't there yet?
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Sure it was. The Deluxe is just making its 10 watts or so at 3 on the dial. It would have been trivially easy to design the gain stages so that a guitar signal made its clean, undistorted 10 watts at 12 on the dial, but then you could never reach that same volume with quieter instruments. Gibson and other companies solved the problem by having a separate higher-gain microphone channel -- as
dangelico can attest, the normal channel can be pretty wimpy by comparison!
- Scott
P.S. I do like
Cleeve's theory that the amps automatically picked up some gain when they went to the miniature preamp tubes. That's why most of the tweed amps went to 12AY7's in the first slot. I could see how someone playing a Deluxe with all 12AX7's in the front end could think that there is a very narrow window of clean headroom in the amp.