Strong hints that Van Halen 1 68 lead was just a slave amp and not the main amp.

[Amp_chaser]

Ralle tried everything including cascades but his original two gain stage specs were the best and even he went back to them, I looked through my saved layouts for his original specs and I don't have it, just his cascaded versions.

If I remember correctly his original Ralle specs were pretty much a stock 68 like the Friedman specs and then he ran .1uf cap on the PI coupling caps and he would try different NFB values like 27K, 47K and 100K on the different feeback taps, like the standard plexi NFB tap on the 8 ohm for a cleaner more headroom tone versus the 4 ohm tap. 47K on the 8ohm tap is a bit cleaner and Jose like the 100K NFB on the 4 ohm tap like the later superlead amps.

PM me if you want the Ralle cascade layouts.

Ralle settup sounded insanely good i remember a that when i came late and that the forum was dead he had some links to his audios the few sound samples he had left sounded really good.

There is one thing i want to add hard driver. There is a mod i want to try that in fact doesn’t add any component except it transforms one of the volumes into a master volume. It’s no jose master no diodes no extra gain stage. It’s no cascade and not the fat cap. It adds 40% of additionnal gain. Perhaps that’s just what it needs ? 40% of gain from a super lead doesn’t seem that much compared to the traditional plexi and way less than an extra gain stage. It’s a different order to wire some components.

However one thing that i question a lot is that weird thing that fryette said that the plexi looked more like a mk2. I wonder if at some point it had 2k7 .68 uf after the 820r .68 uf. That would perhaps explain why jose was obsessed with the .68 uf 2k7. Who knows…