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Hi there,
I was recently browsing through Mesa Boogie patents to gather some ideas and I was wondering what you guys thing about Randall Smith's inventions. Is it just marketing garbage, or do the inventions actually make a significant audible difference?
Take for example DynaWatt, patent 4,713,624 which you can serarch here
http://patft.uspto.gov/netahtml/PTO/srchnum.htm
It seems to be quite a clever circuit with the screen supply decoupled from the plates with a big capacitor, which is charged through a rather large resistor to give a long RC time constant. I guess the effect is that you get a lot of clean headroom when you play single notes, but once you hit it hard, you get a sagging compression effect.
The most classic is probably the SimulClass patent 4,532,476 which I found to work by running a pair of output tubes not only in class A, but also conntected as triodes. Allegedly this makes the whole amp sound like triode class A, although I don't know whether this is a good thing in a guitar amplifier.
The Duo-Class with switchable Push-Pull / Single-Ended power is rather new and probably interesting for those who feel the need to drive a 5W power amp into deep saturation (power-scaling anyone?).
Anyway, I do not own any Boogie amps and I have never played around with one long enough to really pay attention to these things.
I am pretty sure that if any of the above techniques had a real influence on sound it would have been copied by countless other manufacturers, just like the 39k cold bias stage from the SLO-100 can be found in each and every high gain amp today.
On the other hand, why would Boogie do it if it had no point, considering they are trying to sell products to innovation-hostile guitarists.
I was recently browsing through Mesa Boogie patents to gather some ideas and I was wondering what you guys thing about Randall Smith's inventions. Is it just marketing garbage, or do the inventions actually make a significant audible difference?
Take for example DynaWatt, patent 4,713,624 which you can serarch here
http://patft.uspto.gov/netahtml/PTO/srchnum.htm
It seems to be quite a clever circuit with the screen supply decoupled from the plates with a big capacitor, which is charged through a rather large resistor to give a long RC time constant. I guess the effect is that you get a lot of clean headroom when you play single notes, but once you hit it hard, you get a sagging compression effect.
The most classic is probably the SimulClass patent 4,532,476 which I found to work by running a pair of output tubes not only in class A, but also conntected as triodes. Allegedly this makes the whole amp sound like triode class A, although I don't know whether this is a good thing in a guitar amplifier.
The Duo-Class with switchable Push-Pull / Single-Ended power is rather new and probably interesting for those who feel the need to drive a 5W power amp into deep saturation (power-scaling anyone?).
Anyway, I do not own any Boogie amps and I have never played around with one long enough to really pay attention to these things.
I am pretty sure that if any of the above techniques had a real influence on sound it would have been copied by countless other manufacturers, just like the 39k cold bias stage from the SLO-100 can be found in each and every high gain amp today.
On the other hand, why would Boogie do it if it had no point, considering they are trying to sell products to innovation-hostile guitarists.
But still they sound very nice with the screens tied to the plates in this circuit. What gives the Simulclass amps their unique sound IMO are the EL34's and 6L6's running in parallel, or the EL34's also sound very nice by themselves. My guess is that the EL34's are putting out way more in class AB, than the claimed 18 watts class A, or whatever those ads said. Would be fun to measure sometime. 
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