Korean-made spring reverb tanks

[Rhodesplyr]

As I'm sure a lot of you know, Accutronics, the company with roots in the Hammond Organ Company that had been making reverb tanks for decades, was sold to Belton and moved to Korea.

I had a conversation with a boutique amp builder the other day who was telling me how he has had to redesign his spring reverb circuits to get them to work properly with the new reverb tanks. I was wondering if anyone else has had this experience. What immediately occurred to me was that people building clones of vintage circuits may find that they no longer sound like they're supposed to if they have to use the new-production reverb tanks.

[Twist]

In my opinion they're JUNK !!!!! I'm hoping someone else will come along and start building units like the old ones (and not for an inflated boutique price). I've already decided to not incorporate spring reverb into any new future builds.

[jrfrond]

Belton tanks are NOT like the Accutronics tanks. Dull-sounding and lifeless by comparison, but that is pretty much what we have now. Like foreign tubes and other components, vs. all of the good ol' American-made stuff we used to have, we just have to learn to work with them and make them work for us.

[w0ttm]

That would explain why my home built amp, which is basically a high gain Deluxe reverb with channel switching, has different reverb response compared to my 60's vintage Fender Deluxe reverb amp.
I was able to get a good sound by tweaking the reverb circuit a bit.
Nothing major, just gain and frequency response changes.

[Steve Conner]

TAD in Germany brought out their own line of reverb pans for this very reason.

They also sell the new Korean Accutronics ones, and some of the old American-made ones at inflated prices.

[Mark Hammer]

Would any such changes be a product of the design, or of changes to the actual materials used? I ask because in the case of springs, it's all about the mechanical stiffness of the materials the spring is made from.

[Rhodesplyr]

Would any such changes be a product of the design, or of changes to the actual materials used? I ask because in the case of springs, it's all about the mechanical stiffness of the materials the spring is made from.

In this case, I would expect that it's the materials in combination with 50 years of collective experience of how to make the tanks. (Hammond first came out with the Type 4 spring tanks around 1961). I was recently reading about the story of the Rhodes Chroma synthesizer, and, according to this history, CBS originally tried to have them made at the Gulbransen Organ factory -- with disastrous results. The Gulbransen employees apparently simply had no experience building that type of circuit. I used to play a Mt. Vernon Bach Stradivarius trumpet, and I once asked a horn expert what was so special about them. His response: the people who built them.

John Frondelli makes an apt comparison with the production of vacuum tubes. What prevents anyone from making a GZ34 rectifier of comparable quality to those made by Mullard?

Part of me hopes that Belton can get their act together and correct their problems, but part of me hopes that they'll simply fall flat on their faces for putting people who knew what they were doing out of work.

[Mark Hammer]

Well, I'm not thinking in terms of competence/incompetence so much as something simple, like using whatever spring steel was easily and cheaply obtainable locally, and there is something unexpectedly different about what happens when one uses that steel to make those springs.

These sorts of things are akin to what we see mentioned in the pickup makers forum here about changes to magnets and wire from manufacturer to manufacturer, or changes in other pickup-related materials. And if we had any sort of forum about loudspeakers here, I'm sure we would see something about how when speaker manufacturer X moved from here to there after a buyout, the material used for the cones or foam surround changed and they never really sounded quite the same again.

There ARE some aspects of music technology where a material relied on, simply because it was there, and became the default material, becomes an intrinsic part of how we expect something to sound, in ways we don't quite understand or never paid enough attention to. And when the raw physical materials used are changed somehow, the sound changes.

[cminor9]

*shrugs*

Last week I just finished a deluxe reverb clone and I used an Accutronics pan that was made in Korea. Sounds awesome. I haven't been playing amps with reverb for a few years. It's one of things that when you aren't used to hearing it, it sounds kinda odd. These days, most reverb units sound really springy to me, like you are plucking one of those spring door stops screwed into your baseboard. The reverb in the amp I just built doesn't have this quality, which is a good thing in my book. It sounds pretty natural.

Same with tubes. Ok, so the old tubes I plug into my amps sound nice. I can put some 6V6EH tubes in my tweed deluxe and it sounds really good too. Maybe I am just a philistine, or maybe my old tubes aren't very good, but I actually prefer the sound of the 6V6EHs in my tweed deluxe to any old or new tubes I have. Haven't quite figured out what's best in the deluxe reverb yet, though. It's still new.

[g1]

Lends credence to the idea that "made by beautiful girls in climate controlled conditions" really does make a difference.

[pontiacpete]

Hope this thread is too old.
I'm finding that in some amps the belton tanks are making too much reverb and even will feedback when turned up. I've seen it recently in a fender super 60. Have any of you done any circuit changes when you have come across similar or other issues?

[J M Fahey]

I donīt know why that should happen.
Spring reverb technology is not cutting age technology by a long shot.
Agree that Belton "reverse engineered" "own designs" may not be the exact same thing as an original Accutronics one, because when copying out of an actual sample you have over your benchtop, you may not notice some important details that are not readily visible to the naked eye.
Example: even if you know the exact chemical composition of a reverb spring (easy today thanks to chromatographs and stuff like that), its wire diameter, coil diameter, turns per inch, even elasticity modulus , and all other chemical and physical parameters, you might not notice that , say, the spring was oil quenched instead of water quenched or re-heated (tempering?) only to , say, 150šC instead of 200šC or for 2 hours instead of 15 minutes .... stuff (processes) like that which *will* have an influence on sound but ....
now they bought Accutronics, they got all processes, blueprints, the whole enchilada.
Although a romantic image, the "made by beautiful girls in .... " doesnīt mean *that* much for me, after all they just assembled the things and thatīs it.
I donīt imagine them hitting the springs with a little glass rod, frowning, saying "this is not good" and correcting the error with a little sharp toothed file. No way.
I can imagine Belton continuing with their (very succesful) current line, *and* making a smaller plant aside, with all the dies and devices they bought , with "beautiful Korean ladies" assembling the parts made exactly according to the blueprints and processes, US style; obviously to be sold at a higher price.
They might even have some beautiful American ladies plus a couple Engineers flown from the USA on very good salaries, (pocket change for Belton) just to check and make sure the new Oriental stuff is properly made, if such a thing were necessary.
Just my (professionally skewed) point of view.

[52 Bill]

Just replaced a Fender Blues Deluxe tank with a brand new from Fender Belton/Accutronics tank. The sound was ok, but the build quality left me wondering how well they will hold up.

I guess that Korg has been using these for some time now in the Marshall and the Vox lines, so I guess it won't be any worse than that.