stonemarmot.com/rants

By Sid of Stone Marmot
Those of us who build or refurbish guitar amps and speaker cabinets often have a hard time finding speaker grill cloth. What we do find is rather expensive and usually has to be mail ordered. For example, the cheapest grill cloth Antique Electronics Supply sells is $19.95 a yard [...]

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by Sid of Stone Marmot
The Celestion G12L-35 is a 12 inch guitar speaker Celestion made from the early 1980’s to about 2000. Information on this speaker is hard to find, but from what I have found it was intended and used mostly for the Marshall 8412 guitar speaker cabinet. This closed back cabinet [...]

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By Sid of Stone Marmot
The Ampeg B25 is a great vacuum tube bass amplifier that was manufactured from the late 1960’s to the mid 1970’s. It also sounds quite good with guitar. It was conservatively rated at 55 Wrms, though many measure around 70 Wrms. It does have one subtle though potentially [...]

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by Sid of Stone Marmot
The Ampeg V4 series amplifiers (V4, V4B, and VT22), as well as the V2 and VT40, have the same unique active midrange circuit as the Ampeg SVT. But the SVT has the selectable center frequencies set for about 220 Hz, 800 Hz, and 2500 Hz, whereas with all the other [...]

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By Sid of Stone Marmot
Ampeg produced the V4 and the VT22 vacuum tube guitar amps during the 1970s, which were conservatively rated at 100 Wrms. The V4 and VT22 electronics are absolutely identical for a given model year. In fact, though the front may be marked “V4” or “VT22,” the back chassis of [...]

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By Sid of Stone Marmot
A past employer misspelled my name on an award they gave me. They gave me a corrected award about a week later. But this left me wondering what to do with the misspelled award.
The award was a plate made of solid bronze that was about 10 inches in diameter. The plate [...]

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by Sid of Stone Marmot
Recently a friend asked me if he should use speakers that are rated for a lower power or a higher power than the amplifier used to drive them. Most, including myself, feel that the speakers should have a much higher power rating than the driving amplifier, especially for high fidelity [...]

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