Rickresource Rickenbacker Forum

About three years ago I found this amp in a small guitar shop near my home. I'm a bass player and play some guitar for recording, and needed a guitar amp. Well I saw this combo amp there and bought it because it was only $100 and it said "Rickenbacker" on the amp and "ROAD" on the speaker grill. The "Model R160" is on the back. It has two 12" speakers and gets real loud. Now I have heard of ROAD amps but don't know where Rickenbacker is connected with them. I've never seen a picture or any info on this amp anywhere. I was wondering if there was any info on this amp or where I could find out more about it? It also sounds great when I use it for Bass too..with my Rickenbacker 4001CS.

The following information was obtained from Rickenbacker International Corporation through the kind assistance of Mr. John Hall. Introduced in 1984, the R160 with solid state circuitry
featured 160 watts RMS output into 4 x 10"
speakers, reverb, channel switching, effects loop, overdrive, and presence control. This was one of the first Rickenbacker-designed units after Rickenbacker acquired Road(which the Corporation sold years later to Celestion of England). Essentially it had Rickenbacker's rather leading edge electronics, in Road's rather distinctive clothing. It had the heavy duty aluminum road case edge trim and steel
corners. The suggested retail of this amplifier in 1984 was $539US.

To Mr. McCormack. Thats intresting, they must have made a version that had four 10"inch speakers. My amp has two 12"inch 8ohm ROAD brand speakers all packaged in a combo setup. It's all Black (no aluminum corners) I don't know if it's rated at 160watts, does not say anywhere, it has all the features that were listed, reverb, channel switching, ect. It's kind of set up like a Roland Jazz Chorus JC-120. guitar amp (with out the chorus effects..of course.) I'm working on sending a picture of it to post on this Web site. Hope it's something worth adding.. Thanks for the info!

Thanks to L Murray for recently submitting a photo of his Model R160 (Road) amplifier made by Rickenbacker. The comments associated with this topic have been summarized at 1980's R160(Road) Amplifier

The speakers in the R160 were made by Eminence. The 'Road' decals were applied at the factory

Mmm, not necessarily. Many of them were made by Eminence, but we also used speakers by CTS, Punch Press, and JBL. It depended upon the various speaker options selected. This particular unit had 12's, so my best guess is that these are CTS speakers.

Also, RIC never applied ROAD decals to speakers- that was done only by the previous owners.