So it sounds like one of my amps, but actually feels better (to me at least). Its slightly more forgiving. Now I know that's subjective, but that little bit of extra compression made it feel fun to me. When I first played the first proto, it inspired me to pull out the Brian May licks for some reason. None of my amps had ever really done that before. You can literally hear the different Z and CA inspiration in it. Mike had some cracking output transformers already that met my original requirement and they were incredible. He puts a lot of effort in his transformers. Its a bit of an odd ball because its a 6L6 cathode biased for a rock amp. Its only an odd ball because people tend to put things in to buckets of expectations based on what they assume something will sound like versus what the design is actually doing. If you listen to it, you would swear its a fixed biased EL34 design.
Did you never see the interview Sweetwater did of the two of us. We go in to quite a bit of detail of the amp and you can see what the interactions are like.
Having an EE is useless without business experience in the amp industry.
My maz 18 was in a huge box with some paper on the bottom of the amp to sit on and literally no other padding. I was irritated, but somehow the amp was flawless. And so i just turned it up to max volume and played it to see if it was solid, and it was.
Don’t take it personally. It was a general statement independent of your situation. My point is that many people who are great at their craft but fail in their business. Not saying you personally failed.
I'm assuming that was a used purchase. Mike uses custom boxes and a machine that forms packing from foam that completely encases the amp. I used to have to deal with so many idiotic packing situations where someone bought an amp used from reverb and somehow it ended up my problem. The same with horrendous retubes or mods in used amps. People think they are getting bargains used, but often they are getting someone elses experiment or something that has unaddressed issues and the number of footswitches that go missing is insane. They were electronic foot controllers and quite expensive to replace so it wasn't just a case of grabbing a footswitch from GC.
I think both of ours were bought used from guitar center. Luckily, mine sounds amazing. So i know it wasn't fooled with
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Mike uses some old NOS Russian EL84's with a different code (6P14P I think) and I highly recommend when it comes time to replace, get those tubes direct from DrZ. They are way tougher than the garbage EL84's you can buy now. He also uses some odd ball preamp tubes in some amps. In fact he asked me to modify the effects loop design in the CAZ to use a 12DW7, which is a 12AU7 triode and 12AX7 triode in the same bottle. The first proto he had fitted a Metro loop and I thought it sounded anemic in that amp , so I sent it back with a 12AU7 loop and then he asked if I could use the 12DW7. My traditional effects loop used both triodes of a 12AU7, but it actually worked out real nice having the extra gain on the return stage in that design.
