Quote:
Originally Posted by Scott S
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. |
And attest I shall. I've built two really old circuits that you can not distort. The first was a late forties Epiphone Electar and the second was a late thirties Gibson EH-185. The EH-185 will only break up on the mic channel which has a second gain stage. The instrument channel will not even break up when dimed. Both very cool for what I do but not my first choice for dirtier tones.
Jason