New life for a street find guitar amplifier

[@MirlitronOne]

I had exactly the same issue with this transistor amplifier circuit recently, when retrofitting it into an old Heathkit radio. Had to add extra decoupling and bypassed the first preamp stage.

[@INFO_SELABX]

Good time for me... Was planning to do one

[@VK4LA]

Another interesting video there Peter 73

[@godarklight]

The 7812 is good for an amp but only while on a heatsink. I think without any extra cooling 1W of heat can make them pretty toasty.

[@randyab9go188]

A guitar amp is made to be clean at lower volumes and distort at higher volumes or when overdriven on purpose.

[@erwocoolis9451]

A traditional tube amp's crunch channel's power tubes do that. But this is a transistor power amp, a clean one, so it really souldn't go into break up. If it does, it's broken, or trash right from the start, like in this case.

[@INFO_SELABX]

You have bad Guitar cable... Good cable will solve

[@munichman1968]

OMG, Peter! You ruined the amp. Distortion is on purpose by these type of amps used for guitars or blues harmonica.😅Anyway ... I can see your point of view as a builder and a radio amateur to get a clean audio from an amp...😁... but as a blues harmonica player, my heart is bleeding...🥵 Vy 73s from DG1MJH, Roberto

[@ppd3bw]

Maybe next time the original amp will be left untouched while a second circuit is added for "HAM-friendly audio" :-)

[@FarleyHillBilly]

As an ex Marshall employee i had to laugh at this .

[@snarfusmaximus]

Those cheap little practice amps are absoulutely dreadful though.

[@BrekMartin]

Any amp with an overdrive switch is supposed to have a clean channel.

[@iceberg789]

isn't guitar amps built to be distorted ? 🤔

[@BrekMartin]

Definitely not. At least for anything solid state where clipping is just bad for everything. Distortion is achieved with a pair of parallel diodes in opposite directions in the feedback path of one of the initial op-amps. The overdrive button would have bypassed the diodes with a straight connection to run it clean (or as clean as possible for this cheap one).