EQUIPMENT TRIVIA QUESTION FOR THE SENIOR CROWD (NTC)

[Billy Lee]

OK....Did some swapping on some equipment with a friend of mine, and I got in a pair of old EARTH monitors. Now I remember the EARTH stuff from back in the 70's (there, I just gave away my age!) when I was a kid. You'd see it in the music stores, and it had the silver aluminum strips just like the Peavey stuff did, and it resembled the Peavey stuff to a "T".

I can remember there were power amps (back then they were called power boosters) from them that I saw, as well as PA heads, and I believe a few different models of speakers and monitors.

My question is....WHERE, WHEN and WHO had the Earth line? The emblem on the side of the monitor has a New York address, and I know Peavey is in Mississippi. Did Hartley Peavey have anything to do with this stuff????

Anyone have ANY details....I love to research, and find stuff out like this....

[stantheman]

Didn't Earth have Tuck&Roll stuff like Kustom?
Someone did...thought it was Earth...guess I'm
showin' my age...can't remember much facts,
more sensory stuff than anything else...like my
Lady Anne...wow in fact WOWIE!!!

[Paul in Colorado]

The tuck & roll stuff was PLUSH. ("The Plush rush is on!" screamed the ads) Earth was a Peavey knock off out of New York. Other then the look, they had nothing to do with Peavey. I seem to remember hearing that a well known boutique amp builder worked for them. Andy Fuchs maybe?

[TDPRI]

I saw an Earth amp at Krazy Kat Music in San Antonio a few years back and I had never heard of them. Maybe they were limited to the East coast.

I thought it looked like a Kustom... but my memory is shot so I could be 180 degrees out of phase on that.

Good Luck
Paul Green

[Ringo]

Actually I'm pretty sure I've seen some early Earth amps that were covered ala Kustom with pleated vinyl.
Some others were like the later tolex Peavey amps

http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll...category=14973

About 1979 I got a new Earth Revival amp, it was a tweed Bassman type 4-10 combo - it was the first Tweed amp I'd ever seen, looked great!
This Earth amp was a hybrid design with ss preamp/tube poweramp - like the first Peavey Classic amps and later Musicman amps.
It had master volume and reverb, and it actually sounded good - when it was working. A local music store was a dealer for them, shortly after I got the amp it died. They ordered me a replacement chassis, but even that one kept frying some caps or something in the circuit. I had it fixed about 3 times and then traded it and some $ for a 135 watt SF Twin that was pretty much bulletproof!
Apparently the company went belly up not long after, they never even asked for the old chassis back. Funny story though, my brother bought the old chassis, got it fixed , built a cab for it and played it for years, then sold it to someone else who used it for years!

[Dave W]

My recollection is that they came from the same company. Plush (pleated tuck and roll) starting in the late 60s, then Earth in the 70s. And the early Earth amps had similar - but not exactly the same - pleated covering. The brand names may have overlapped a couple of years. The later Earth amps were the Peavey-style knockoffs.

IIRC the company was on Long Island and at one time was called Earth Sound Research. But my memory could be off, it's been a long time.

[Bill Hullett]

Picture this......a smoky boardroom meeting circa 1970..."well we have a chioce guys....we're gonna do cheap knock offs of amps...as I we it we have two options....do knock offs of Fenders and Marshalls ....OR.....Kockoffs of Peaveys and Kustoms.....The rest as they say is HISTORY!!!!! :-) :-)

Bill Hullett

[Billy Lee]

I was messing around last night on the internet and did a search for EARTH SOUND RESEARCH. Not much out there, but after all, the company was gone almost twenty years before the internet came along, AND the company didn't sound like much to begin with.

The one article I did find was from a guy who worked for a company that supplied EARTH SOUND RESEARCH with some of their parts. According to him, the whole company was based on the knock-offs of Peavey and Kustom, but they cheapened all the capasitors and diodes, etc., etc., so as to be able to offer THEIR product cheaper to the general public than the company from which the design was stolen from!

Another article said the equipment was actually pretty good stuff, if it was rebuilt to the original companies specs. Sounds to me like there are still a few pieces floating around out there!