Why didn't Ampeg amps become more popular?

[Axtman]

I am currently reading the Ampeg book. It says that Ampeg grew tremendously during the 60's. They go to the point where they were 9 months backlogged and had to move their factory to step up production. I have not finished the book but why did Ampeg drop off in popularity? Other than the SVT, you don't see a lot of vintage Ampeg amps around.

[Justin Thomas]

Having read that book til it literally fell apart in my hands...

I think there are a few factors at work. Ampeg was usually seen as the "East Coast Fender." And, later in the paragraph where you see that 9-month backlog, you also see a mention that other companies were happy to fill the order: Fender, Marshall, Standel, Acoustic, or others. Customers who needed an amp weren't willing to wait - they're WORKING musicians - no amp, no income. So a lot of those backlog orders were canceled.

Ampeg was pretty slow to get on the train for current guitar sounds. Not until the early 70s did they finally make an amp with switchable distortion. The founder Mr. Hull HATED distortion. No problem with that, but he never accepted that rock was there to stay, and it was too late. And even when they did catch up, the sound they offered was unique, but just not "popular." Having cranked a VT-40 to eleven, it's a BEAUTIFUL sound!!!

I think the guys who like them tend to buy them and keep them. I've personally owned 6 vintage Ampegs, all made from 62-72. A Reverberocket, 2 Reverberocket IIs, a 66 Jet which never was loud enough & is still on my fixit list, a 68 Rocket II (but a Reverberocket II at heart) & a GU-12. My favorite was my GU-12 til my friend blew the OT, and I VERY regrettably gutted it without thinking. I still have the cabinet... My nicer Reverberocket II I sold to a jazzing buddy, who still gigs it with his archtop. It was a great sound, but as I progressed, it wasn't MY sound...

Another problem with Ampegs is the @#$%ing TUBES. Yes, they tend to last a while and most of my Ampegs did come with original tubes or NOS replacements, but I'd buy busted Ampegs cheap cuz it was less for the busted amp than a pair of 7591As. And where in the hell you gonna get a 6BK11 for my Jet? I managed to score some 6C10s, but that only fixed the tremolo, and even those are $100 each IF you can find them. 7027s, 7199s, 7591As, and even the cheap oddballs (6CG7, etc) nobody offers testing on. It's a bitch. Yeah, you can rewire the sockets, but the sound DOES change.

I really do love these amps, and they had a real commitment to quality, and didn't just copy Fender or Marshall circuits. They used cathdyje & paraphase inverters LONG after the other Big Names dropped them. They never issued an amp with a less-than-12" speaker until the SVT, and that wasn't exactly a cost-cutting measure, was it?

Justin

[J M Fahey]

For Bass, they still are very popular.
SVT is the flagship and tows all others which also sell quite well.
Now their large guitar amps were very good sounding, heavy, incredibly well built (V4, VT22, VT40, etc.) but I guess very expensive, in any case Fender swept the market by storm.
And they covered *every* niche hole, from Champ to Dual Showman with JBL and everything in between.

[Enzo]

Ampeg used great tubes. it isn't their fault that 50 years later they are not common types. I have a B18X, and the pair of 7027 in it is a official matched pair from RCA. I walked into my local parts store, and asked for a MP set of 7027. He walked to the shelf, picked a pair up and brought it to the counter. Right on the box: 7027A MP. Triple triodes like the 6K11 were state of the art then.

[Justin Thomas]

Edit: my apologies to Enzo. Well then. Seems AES & Tube Depot both have 7027s in stock... I guess I gave up looking a while ago & a stash surfaced. At the same time, $250 for power tubes for an amp that cost not much more, possibly, would be a deterrent. Still no luck on 6BK11s.

I don't mean to say they're not great tubes. But they are hard to come by... and the 6BK11 is particularly elusive. I have a 6K11 & a 6AV11 & a couple 6U10s - not the same. I also have managed to collect 4 pairs of 7591s over the years. Maybe the newest offerings are closer to original spec, but for quite some time new production were just a 6L6GC with a different basing. To this day, in my 15 years of tube shopping, I have yet to see a new old stock 7027 for sale... usually they're sporting the old faithful Sovtek 5881WXT.

Yes, they're great tubes. But damn, when they go... to retube my Jet (J12-D) would cost me $350, (2x7591 & 2x6BK11) <IF> I could find NOS 6C10s. I got mine for $20 each about 10 years ago, only hoping to someday come across a Super Champ that needed some... I actually bought them from a store that had sold Super Champs new, but the owner said he hadn't seen one come in for years, so he let me buy the tubes. If there were some 6BK11s floating about, I don't want to imagine the price - probably up there with Mullard EL34s & ECC83s.

Justin

[bob p]

I like Ampeg amps, being a long time SVT user. In the 70s I was playing bass through the big SS Acoustic folded horn rigs and when the SVT came out Ampeg ate Acoustic's lunch. Ampeg bass amps have been well revered from the outset. Everything they made for bass was highly regarded, from the little fliptops that defined the Motown sound and the 70's "Cop Show" bass tone, all of the way up to the SVT.

(It's sort of funny that Ampeg became famous for their bass amps, while Fender became famous for their guitar amps and not for bass amps, the "Bassman" moniker notwithstanding.)

Ampeg's guitar amps never seemed to be as highly regarded by players as their bass amps. Yes, they were well made and yes, they produce some great tone, but they never quite sounded like Fenders or Marshalls, and IMO the Ampeg guitar amp sound was never all that sought after. I say this just having re-watched Woodstock, Gimme Shelter and another Stones on the road in the 70s movie (can't remember the name). I've come to the conclusion that I'm not really a fan of the Stones' live tone during the Ampeg period. Just my opinion, of course. But it seems that guitarists as a group seem to love the Fender Tweed tones, the Fender BF/SF tones, and the Marshall tones. Those 3 tones are iconic. Today people talk about Tweed tone, BF/SF tone and Marshall tone, but for some reason nobody ever talks about "Ampeg tone" in the context of iconic guitar tone.

Then there's the serviceability problem. Unlike Fender and Marshall, which still have their most of their main tube types in production (6L6 and EL34), I think the popularity of Ampegs suffered from the demise of the 7027. Their use of the triple triodes didn't help. More on that later.

Back in the day when 7027 were widely available nobody was ever concerned about parts availability, but when 7027 got expensive and hard to find, I think that hurt peoples' perceptions of Ampegs as being amps that used expensive oddball tubes and their desirability as vintage amps went into the toilet. Fenders and Marshalls were easier to re-tube, and they sounded great, so not all that many people sought out the Ampegs. The classic Fenders and Marshalls were easily serviceable and people wanted them. A lot of people didn't want to fuss with Ampegs when their tubes became expensive, or when they had to pay someone to do a tube conversion on them. Being well informed and fearless with soldering irons, we're an atypical group -- most of us here wouldn't hesitate to address that problem, so we tend not to think of it. But the non-techie people and players seemed to avoid Ampegs because of it. I think that hurt Ampegs in the classic gear market.

I'm not sure that I'd say that the popularity of Ampegs suffered because they didn't create additional distortion circuits in their designs. During the relevant time period Fender never really did that to any degree of success, nor did Marshal. F&M got their iconic tones by designing clean amps, just like Ampeg did, and by enthusiastic musicians who turned the amps up LOUD. When the 70s came along and distortion became popular, and Fender eventually got around to adding distortion circuits to their amps, nobody liked them. If we're going to give credit to anyone for the first truly useful add-on distortion circuits in an amp, I'd have to give credit to Randall Smith, not Fender or Marshall. I don't think the absense of distoriton circuits is what hurt Ampeg.

What Ampeg book is it that you're reading? IIRC it may have been penned by a forum member.

[bob p]

A little hijack about those mini triple triodes, like the 6k11 and the Compactrons --

Long Version:

Yeah, they were "state of the art", but they only became state of the art at the end of the era that made them relevant. They were too little too late.

By the time that the space-saving triple-triodes had been introduced it was already evident that cramming multiple devices into a single glass envelope wasn't going to provide enough savings in real estate for tubes to remain competitive in the market where they had to compete with SS gear in circuit designs that were becoming ever more complex. IMO the multi-package vacuum tube devices that were introduced in the 60s-70s were the tube designers' dying gasp at trying to put off the inevitable. Everyone knew that the Compactrons, as space saving as they were, were not a viable competitor to SS gear which was so much more compact.

Unfortunately, a lot of those Compactron type tubes just arrived late to the party. As far as guitar amps go, the world according to Fender and Marshall had already standardized on the miniature noval high-mu twin triodes as the ultimate space saver, compared to their larger octal predecessors. The majority of the guitar world was designed around the 12A?7 preamp tubes.

In the 60s Ampeg was the only major guitar amp company to use the 6BK11, and while that worked for them at the time, that turned out to be something that worked against them years later in terms of vintage amp desirability. The 6BK11 is in very short supply today and it is expensive. It's cost works against the desirability of those Ampeg circuits.

In the late 70s Fender made the same mistake. To save space they put the Sylvania 6C10 high-mu triple triode into their most complicated, space-constrained amps like the Super Twin Reverb (STR). Just like the 6BK11, the 6C10 is no longer widely available, it's shortness of supply has made it expensive, and it's given users yet another reason to hate an amp that was never all that popular in the first place.

I can't really fault Ampeg for making the 6BK11 decision in the 1960s, but I can certainly fault Fender for making such a bonehead decision with the 6C10 in the late 70s. By the late 70s the writing was already on the wall -- in the mid-70s TV sets were already hybrid designs, using Compactrons in combination with transistors and early integrated circuits. At that point the Compactrons were already regarded as a legacy kludge solution which became totally obsolete only a few years later. By the mid 80s they were history.

I'll stick my neck out by saying that the high-mu triple-triodes weren't a bad idea when Ampeg decided to use them in the 60s, but they had to be the absolute worst idea that Fender ever came up with when Fender decided to use them in the late 70s. In the late 70s the 6C10 Compactron was already approaching obsolescence, and Fender did the amps like the Super Twin Reverb a disservice by using an oddball Compactron tube in it. Realistically speaking, the triple-triode doesn't save that much space over a pair of dual-triodes, and at $50-$100 each for a NOS replacement, they ruin the desirability of an otherwise fine amp.

When my STR finally needs to have it's 6C10 replaced, I've decided that I'm going to just punch a hole in the chassis and modify the amp to use a pair of twin-triodes instead. I don't care that I'll be modding an otherwise original Fender amp from the 70s -- it's not as if the STR is collectible to the point that any reasonable person would grumble about the 6C10 being designed out of the amp. In the context of today's parts availability I think most people would actually prefer two twin triodes.

Short Version:

Compactrons suck.

[Justin Thomas]

Or just ping me...
If I haven't fixed that Jet by then, I'll let you have the whole amp with 2 (TWO!) 6C10s in it!

Justin

[Mick Bailey]

The Rivera-era Super Champ was even later - I think 1982. Fender must have had a good line on 6C10 tubes to still be using them at that time.

[bob p]

> Or just ping me...

Deal!

[Leo_Gnardo]

Ampeg's popularity was first a regional thing. Headquartered in New Jersey, they were first popular in the Northeast US. Similar to the way Traynors could easily be found in the Detroit-Albany-Toronto triangle in their early years. Then, going in & out of business for a while, including a brief move to Japan, by early 1990's St Louis Music finally picked up the company, started by making good SVT's, and had national distribution. St Louis persevered by issuing smaller amps that looked like Ampeg's 60's models but were different, and some of them quite good. For instance, their Super Jet was essentially a 1x12 combo with a copy of a Marshall 50 watt amp powering it, a helluva good amp in a cheap(!) and very portable package. Since LOUD took over St Louis @ 2005 they have let both Ampeg & Crate to flounder. I don't see many in stores. How or why this has come to be is beyond my understanding, both brands have proven their quality and popularity in the past (despite sniping by a certain "amp gooroo.")

Compactrons - my only guess is Ampeg was offered a knock-down deal on a batch of zillions of them once their manufacturers realized they had a white elephant stuck in their warehouses.

Rolling Stones - the legend has it that the Stones arrived in the US for their 1969 tour, but their gear was being held up by customs for very close inspection. After all those rock bands always stashed dope in their equipment, right? With an appearance at Madison Square Garden imminent, somebody who knew somebody got Ampeg to lend the Stones a stage full of SVT and V-9 amps. V-9 the guitar equivalent of SVT, I've only seen one in my life and Steve Morse was playing it. The Stones appreciated the loan, and the sound of their Ampeg gear, and you can hear it obviously on albums from Exile on Main Street right thru Some Girls. IMHO the V2 and VT40 are the ones to go for if you're trying to get that Stones tone.

[Justin Thomas]

Hey Leo,

I think the only one that existed at the time of that Stones tour was the SVT. Th ere ere only a few heads in development, and they sent the Ampeg tech out on the road with the amps. This was also while they were till using 6146s, and that Stones tour is what helped convince them to use 6550s... They used them for everything, just plugged into a variety of cabinets. The V-9 was a mid-70s thing, and I'd love to get my hands on one. Also, the "official" story is that their amps were damaged when they were plugged into the wrong voltage. The whole fiasco was chronicled in the book mentioned in the first post...

That said, I find your explanation for the missing gear a LOT more plausible!

For those with more sensitive ears, the little GU-12 was a mighty fine contender for Stones sound IMHO. Granted, I've cranked a VT-40 to 11, too... But the GU-12 had trem!

Another thought: in the mid-70s, maybe it was insightful for Ampeg to stick with their regular output sections instead of the wild (and wonderful) ones like the Fender 400PS had... granted, you still risk blowing an SVT cab if you only plug in one cabinet. But at least you weren't stuck with only 1/3 or 1/2 power.

Justin

[Enzo]

The V-9 is an SVT power amp chassis with a guitar preamp up top. I used to have one, but sold it to a friend here in town.

[bob p]

Didn't know about the V-9. I want one.

Truth be told, I've used my SVT-II Pros in the rolling rack for guitar on many multiple occasions. My 4-string rig drives a stack of from 1 to 4 EVM-15L/TL606, depending on the gig. Those speakers kick ass for guitar, and when driven by SVT they absolutely tame the animal in even the most hard hitting drummer.

[Enzo]

This listing has good photos:
https://reverb.com/item/3261227-new-...ctual-shipping