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Just got an old (67-69) Deluxe Reverb into the shop. How high should I be able to crank the volume before it starts to distort? And how can I extend the clean response.
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What kind of guitar/pickups are you using to test? A strat and a LP will overdrive the amp at quite different volumes.
Also, what do you mean by distort? Do you mean a technical 5% THD kind of distort, or do you mean "starts to sound a little gritty" kind of distort?
Based on my DR reissue, if I plug my Les Paul with super distortion pickups into input 1 of the vibrato channel, the sound starts getting noticeably gritty before even getting to 3. My low-end strat needs to get to 4 or so before getting much grit.
By 7, my les paul is totally totally saturated. It's an awesome sound for lead work. If it weren't for my THD hotplate, it would also be deafeningly loud.
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Oh, and to start to answer your question about extending the clean response, can you tell if the amp is working correctly? There's lots of broken circuit elements that might cause early distortion. Usually it's a bad sounding distortion, though. Is the early distortion in your DR decent sounding or bad?
Alternatively, can you tell if it has been modified? As I'm sure you know, there are lots of mods to purposely make the pre-amp overdrive earlier than originally designed. A previous owner might have desired this sound. Removing any such mods would return your missing headroom.
Finally, if the amp's owner uses high-output (ie, humbucking) pickups, the easiest way to add headroom is to plug into input 2 instead of input 1. That's why Fender amps have two inputs: one with high sensitivity (input 1) and one with low (input 2). When I want decent clean sounds, my strat goes into input 1 but my Les Paul always goes into input 2. If input 2 gets the sound that the amp's owner wants, then you won't have to mod this classic amp.
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