Rickresource Rickenbacker Forum

funnily enough, about a mile up the road from me here in London is TINY store called "Wild Guitars"....the guy in there (quite an old guy if i remember) does two things. He repairs guitars....and deals in original Hiwatt amps

Its nuts, the store is no bigger than an average kitchen but theres like 20 stacks in there! all quite cheap too.

My old drummer for some reason has one of these things......an original spec 60's Hiwatt 100 head with matching 4X12 cab with those fane speakers Phil was talking about.....that thing is insanely loud - but completely clean, you have to push it to the max to even get a crunchy guitar sound out of it.

I was using my Trace Elliot 715 for a rehearsal round the drummers house, and just felt like plugging my 4003 into the hiwatt.

It had a nice sound, very warm and fuzzy. Kinda muddy really. But as soon as the band kicked in it was hardly amazing, not much punch or power. My 715, which is 150w with a single 15" was far better in terms of punch and projection.

The big Hiwatt looked impessive but didnt seem to cut it, not for bass anyway

Hi-Watts were funny amps over here in the states. Really well built, but with some issues. Some of the bass cabinets had concrete in the bottom to add stability!!! An SVT cabinet felt like a tiny combo in comparison.

Not all the US import models had Partridge transformers, whether it was a cost cutting choice by the distributor, or they were pilfered by unscrupulous dealers, I do not know. One thing is for sure, it lead to issues in the quality of the sound. At least this was true for basses.

The British made bass amp that worked very well on the US/Canadian side of the lake was Orange. The Graphic model produced an awsome sound!! This was basically a real loud and clean guitar amp. You had to play these things on "5" to get it to "snap into focus" & 5 was plenty loud! It had to be 127 db, somewhere between a jackhammer & a jet plane!

Orange amps also had those cool, enigmatic heirogylphics on the panel to discribe what each knob's function was. There was the fist knob, the mountain peak knob, squiggly line knob ect.

As a guitar player, it took me two decades to figure out how to get what I was looking for out of a Hiwatt. Being used to a 50W Marshall, I was trying to apply the same logic to the Hiwatt - doesn't work. The key s to have the cab in another room, so you can get the amp loud enough to do its thing.

My old Marshall Major was similiar, I used to run it at around 8 with a P bass and it was still clean sounding and loud! It was the same with a guitar, very clean almost all the way up, they used to use distortion devices with these things way back when. The louder and cleaner an amp is basically means that it is a good quality amp with a lot of watts.
I remember seeing Lesley West with Orange amps, I think he was endorsed by them, and I guess they are being made again. They sounded great with Lesley West, but I think he could have made a Radio Shack sound good.
Ok, now a good geezer story:
One of my friends use to play with a very fastidious guitar player who's band was opening for Mountain at a big club called The Cricket in Ashland Ma. in the early 70's. He set the controls for Lesley on his Marshall after they were done their set so Lesley wouldn't blow up his amp. The first thing Lesley did when he took the stage was run his hand over all the knobs and turn them up to ten! The guitar player almost had a heart attack and ran up onstage, but Lesley threw him off, haha!

new orange amps.........£300 for a 10w 1x8 practice amp......

yes exactly....