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 for 34 inch wide pieces.

I found this shade cloth at Home Depot and Lowe’s that seems to work well as grill cloth. It is made by Easy Gardener Products. It is intended for using outdoors as a shade cloth on porches, patios, kids’ swing sets, etc. But it looks like grill cloth and appears to be as porous. It comes in four colors, Smoke Blue, Saddle Tan, Heavy Green, and Heavy Black, though not all stores will carry all colors.

I bought some that is Saddle Tan originally to use as covers for some bass traps I built. I ran some listening tests placing this cloth in front of speakers and noticed no more high frequency loss than I would expect for grill cloth. So I tried some I had left over after building the bass traps as grill cloth for a guitar amp I built. The amp, shown below, is made from an old late 1970’s Fender PA135, dramatically rewired. The cabinet, which I built out of some scrap plywood, has a 15 inch speaker from a Fender Bassman 20 and two 8 inch speakers from a Shure Vocalmaster PA column. I painted the speaker baffle board that is behind the grill cloth black.

Figure 1 - Shade Cloth Used As Grill Cloth On Guitar Amp

The picture below shows another cabinet I built to house some Ampeg VT22 electronics I had. It makes the VT22 essentially into an Ampeg V4. I painted the board that the cloth is mounted on white, which was not a good idea. Black would have been better as the open area in the center would be less likely to show up.

Figure 2 - Shade Cloth Used As Grill Cloth On Guitar Amplifier Head

This cloth can be easily purchased locally, assuming you have a Home Depot or Lowe’s near you. This shade cloth comes in six foot widths. The cloth I bought from Home Depot was 20 feet long and cost a little under $30. This is equivalent to costing about $2.25 a yard for 36 inch widths, costing about one ninth as much as the cheapest grill cloth Antique Electronics Supply sells. It can be bought in smaller packaged lengths, though it will cost a little more per yard than the 20 foot length packages. A Lowe’s near me also sells it by the foot for $1.72 per foot, six foot wide.

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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 is about the smallest cabinet you can fit four 12 inch speakers into and was part of the Valvestate line. It appears other manufacturers, such as Fender, Laney, and possibly Crate, have also used this speaker in their amps and cabinets.

From the little data I have found, it is a 35 W speaker with a 80 Hz to 5000 Hz frequency response. It has one of the lowest sensitivities of any Celestion I has seen, with various places claiming it to be between 95 to 97 db at 1W/1m. For many, this is a negative as it means the speaker isn’t as loud for the same power input as most Celestions or other speakers. But for many others, this is a positive as it means the speaker isn’t as loud for the same power input as most Celestions or other speakers. This means you can get this speaker to crunch at lower, more reasonable volume levels better suited for the studio, small clubs, churches, and home. This also means you can run your amp harder and get more of its natural distortion at lower volume levels.

And this speaker does have that distinctive Marshall crunch. I recently bought four of these speakers for $125 and installed them into a four 12 inch speaker cabinet someone was throwing away that I salvaged. I don’t know who made it, but it had a “200” metal label on the front and vertical silver stripes against a black and brown background for the grill cloth. I think Yamaha may have had cabinets like this in the late 1970’s, early 1980’s. The cabinet is all ¾ inch plywood and barely fits four 12 inch speakers. It had four vents in the back board which I sealed with plywood. So its size is similar to the Marshall 8412. Since these speakers weigh less than 5 pounds each, the weight of this cabinet loaded dropped from 70 lb. to 56 lb.

I am using a Dean Markley Signature 120 tube amp to drive it. This 19” rack mount amp is effectively a clone of the Marshall 2203 100W master volume amp. The differences are: a) This amp uses 6L6 output tubes, b) it has most of the more popular “hot rod” mods recommended for the 2203 already in it, c) it has a solid state reverb, which sounds pretty decent, and d) it has a solid state active midrange control, which gives much broader control of the midrange. I got this amp for $5 at a garage sale. I removed half the output tubes and adjusted my speaker impedance connection accordingly to cut the power in half to about 50W.

The speakers sound quite good in this cabinet. They definitely have the Marshall midrange crunch at moderate volume levels. They do clean well, though there are better (and much more expensive) speakers for this. But they excel when pushed, and you don’t have to push them hard. They have a smooth top end, unlike the Celestion Vintage 30 I have, which can be a bit harsh and ice picky in the highs (for me, at least; some like that sound). They have a clean, even, well defined low end, though it isn’t prominent and chest thumping like some speakers. Some people say the low end can be a bit flabby, but these same people also state that they were using open backed cabinets. I was using a Gretsch 6196T big hollow body guitar, which is the guitar that I am most intimate with its sound and can definitely put out some low end (unlike my Tele or Rick).

Are these the best speakers I have ever heard or played through? No. I’ll take my Weber alnico Blue Dog any day over these speakers. But the Blue Dog cost me $185 when I bought it, whereas the G12L-35s were $125 for four speakers. The G12L also does the Marshall thing better than the Blue Dog. I think the G12L is better sounding than the much more expensive Vintage 30. But many will disagree with this. If you need volume and lots of clean headroom, the V30 or Classic Lead series are definitely upgrades to the G12L. But, if you need good sound at reasonable volume levels, don’t have a lot of money, and want to save your back, the G12L is definitely a speaker to consider. You can usually get the G12L-35 second hand in good condition for between $25 to $35 each. You will have a difficult time finding a speaker that sounds this good at anywhere near this price.

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We see in the news all these recent disasters due to hurricanes, floods, tornadoes, etc. Many images appear of houses that are totally destroyed and their contents scattered all over. Among these contents are probably a lot of important papers and records. This leads to the possibility of identity theft if these records fall into the wrong hands.

This is just not a local area concern. Tornadoes and floods can scatter these records many miles, even hundreds of miles, from their point of origin. Records that are washed out to sea by hurricane tidal surges can end up ashore in other countries, such as Mexico, Columbia, or Cuba.

How can you protect yourself from this possibility? After the disaster, there isn’t much you can do other than follow the already readily available advice on what to do if you are an identity theft victim. But a big thing you can do to minimize this potential problem in case of a future disaster is to get rid of all unnecessary personal records.

Ten years is the maximum I have found that you need to keep any record. Many records don’t even need to be kept that long. Therefore, you should destroy all these older unnecessary records. These records include anything with your name and address and either your social security number, an account number, passwords, PINs, or any other means of getting into an account of yours or allow someone to open an account in your name. This includes paychecks, utility bills, insurance correspondence, particularly health insurance, credit card statements, and bank and investment account information.

This may bother some people as they pride themselves on their keeping of complete records so that they can verify most any financial event in their life. But the peace of mind this may afford has to be weighed against the possibility of these records getting in the wrong hands.

Some may argue that you need to keep some records and even one record falling in the wrong hands can be a problem. But the less records you have, the lower the probability of a critical item surviving a disaster and journey in readable form and being discovered by the wrong person.

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Galveston and New Orleans are two of a number of cities that have been fairly recently devastated by flood waters from hurricanes. We heard so much in the news about the number of homes that were damaged and destroyed by these events. But what about the businesses? What about the gas stations, paint stores, pharmacies, pest control firms, etc. What about the industrial places, such as chemical processing plants, petroleum storage facilities, etc. They may actually have a much more severe impact due to their resulting waste.

Fortunately in the case of Galveston and most other cities devastated by hurricane flood waters (if any of this could be called fortunate), the flood waters weren’t there for long, maybe 6 to 24 hours. Also, when the waters receded, they took a lot of the liquid waste with them. This does result in greater offshore pollution, though it is greatly diluted by the Gulf of Mexico or Atlantic, depending what city was flooded. This is still a problem and needs to be considered, though.

This is not true for New Orleans. Parts of the city were flooded for as much as six weeks, with much of the flooded areas being flooded for three weeks. There was a “witches brew” of chemicals soaking most of the city. This included gasoline and oil from flooded automobiles, gas stations, auto parts stores, auto service centers, lawn maintenance equipment, etc. This included household and industrial cleaners, solvents, and paints. Batteries, battery acids and lead. During Katrina, 66 chemical plants and petroleum storage facilities were flooded. Three EPA listed Superfund toxic waste sites around New Orleans were also flooded.

In New Orleans from Katrina, this mixture of water and chemicals had weeks to soak into anything the least bit porous. This not only includes the obvious, such as mattresses, drapes, clothes, cushioned furniture, housing insulation, and carpets. But weeks is enough time for this stuff to soak into flooded wood, concrete, cement blocks, bricks, the ground itself.

If you don’t believe me with regards to the last sentence, get a cement block or a piece of wood, weigh it, then submerge it into a container of water for three weeks, and then weigh it again. This stuff can absorb more moisture than you think, and many of these chemicals have better penetrating capability than water. And when it is removed from the water, it will take a long time for these chemicals to work their way back out of the object. Traces of chemicals in excess of most safety standards, in other words, enough to get schools evacuated, will be leaching out of this stuff for years, if not decades.

But little can be found with regards toxic and carcinogenic substance levels measured around New Orleans since Katrina. The goal by most all government officials, both local and federal, and many business people was to get the population of the area back to pre-Katrina levels as soon as possible. Even most so-called liberals and humanitarians ignored this issue. This may be admirable with regards to the area economy, but not from a human life standpoint.

Look at all the chemicals in your own home. Multiply that by at least 100,000 for the number of homes affected in New Orleans. Add to that all the gas stations, cars, Wal-Mart’s, drug stores, industrial firms, funeral homes, hospitals, chemical plants, etc.

The real questions are: Do you want your kids to play and grow up in homes, schools, yards, and playgrounds that have been soaked with these kind of chemicals? Do you know what the level of chemical contamination is where you are? Why isn’t anyone measuring this data? If they are, why aren’t they making it public?

An even bigger question is what happens to some of these chemicals when they are mixed together? They could form something far worse than any of the individual chemicals.

As mentioned earlier, this problem is probably not as severe in Galveston. But it is not nonexistent. The people in the Galveston area should also be asking these questions.

Note: A big reason why the local and federal governments don’t want people thinking about this toxic chemical issue is that they were pumping these waters directly into the local waterways and eventually into the Gulf Of Mexico. They probably wanted to pump out New Orleans before the issue came up and halted their pumping until some kind of filtering or other safeguard was devised to keep these chemicals out of the environment. They still don’t want to issue brought up because they still don’t want to add these safeguards.

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Our society appears to consider it a big no-no for someone to try to enhance their physical performance with drugs. We hear about Olympic athletes being tested for drugs and barred from competing if they test positive. Baseball pitcher Roger Clemens was front page news because someone accused him of using steroids. This was so important to some people that the US Congress even investigated these allegations. Many also claimed that Barry Bonds and Mark McGuire achieved their baseball home run records due to drug enhanced performances and that these records should be tagged with asterisks as not quite valid and they shouldn’t even be eligible for the Hall Of Fame.

But society doesn’t seem to be as concerned about drug-enhanced creative performances. Songwriters and musicians are most notorious for their drug use. But many famous painters, authors, poets, actors, etc., have also used drugs or alcohol (just a drug by another name) to enhance their creative performances.

True, most people frown upon drug use by anybody, including artistic types. But most people accept it and are willing to overlook its use by artistic people. You don’t hear about drug tests before concerts or Congressional investigations into artists’ drug use. You don’t hear of anyone being rejected by the Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame or denied Grammies or Academy Awards because of their alleged drug use.

Why is drug-enhanced physical performance considered so horrific while drug-enhanced creative performance is tolerated and overlooked? Why the double standard?

It can’t be because one is of little monetary consequence. The top athletes and the top musicians and actors have roughly similar incomes and are in about as much demand by advertisers.

It can’t be because either sports or the arts have little impact on society. Sporting events and concerts play similar venues and draw similar sized crowds. Tens of millions go to movie theaters each week.

It can’t be a role model for young people issue. Music appears to have a bigger impact on youths than sports. Youths are the biggest consumers and the main target audience for most music. You probably find as many, if not more, youths who model their looks and behavior after their favorite musicians as those who model these traits after their favorite athletes.

So why the double standard? I would think that messing with your mind would be more serious than messing with your body.

Maybe it is because it is easier to see the results of messing with your body than the results of messing with your mind.

Maybe it is because most people can believe that drugs can enhance physical performance but question the effectiveness of drugs to enhance mental performance. Many would claim that drugs hurt mental performance. In fact, “getting stupid” is just another way of saying that a person has used too much of a drug.

But I’m not talking about intelligence here. I’m talking about creativity. Few will deny that drugs open up the mind to ideas, observations, and viewpoints that the drug user would ordinarily not have or perceive. And for a person whose lifestyle and income is dependent upon their creativity, these unique ideas, observations, and viewpoints can be as good as gold.

Many creative types feel that drugs are the only, or at least the easiest, way to get these unique ideas. This is not true. You can train yourself to be more open to unique ideas and viewpoints without drugs. In fact, you can be more creatively productive without the drugs because, even though the drugs may help your creativity, they also tend to hurt your memory, reasoning, and physical performance. You can accomplish a lot more if everything is operating at or near its peak capabilities.

So, why the double standard? I don’t know. This is just food for thought.

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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 very serious design problem: The low frequency response is TOO low.

There are four places in signal chain, other than the output transformer, where the low frequency bandwidth is limited. (See http://www.kbapps.com/audio/schematics/tubeamps/ampeg/b25.html for the schematic of the amp.) These are:

When you combine these cutoff frequencies by the root-sum-square method (the correct way to combine these frequencies), you get an overall cutoff frequency for the amp of about 9 Hz. This is less than half the lowest frequency (about 20 Hz) a healthy human can hear. It is much lower than the lowest note (about 41 Hz) on a standard four string bass guitar.

This does not include the cutoff frequency of the output transformer. I don’t know the low frequency limit of the output transformer. But due to a test I’ll describe shortly, it is definitely extremely low and has little influence on these results.

Why is this a problem? One reason is that it is that we are wasting energy and headroom amplifying these subsonic frequencies that no one can hear anyway. This causes the amp to saturate sooner and more often, reducing its apparent volume capability.

But a much more serious reason is that it damages speakers. The lower a frequency, the more a speaker has to move to reproduce this frequency at a given volume level. This speaker cone movement is usually referred to as cone excursion. If there is too much cone excursion, the speaker cone will start to physically distort. The voice coil will no longer move straight in and out but will start to tilt. The magnetic gap that the voice coil moves in is very narrow. When the coil starts tilting, it can rub against the walls of the magnetic gap. This can short out and burn up the voice coil, cause it to catch and rip loose (separate) from the cone, or a number of other bad things. In other words, excessive cone movement can damage speakers. This excessive cone excursion is probably the number one reason speakers fail.

It is easy to demonstrate this potential problem with the Ampeg B25. Plug a bass guitar into a normal input, turn the amp on with a reasonable volume level, and simply push the low E string up and down fast. Don’t pick it or pluck it or play it in any way, just push the string. Watch your speaker as you do this. You will see the speaker move appreciably in and out. This is not good. Simply pushing on the strings or especially slap playing could damage your speakers.

(This also demonstrates that the B25 output transformer has a very broad low frequency response. Most tube transformers can’t pass such low frequencies. This shows that Ampeg didn’t cut corners in the design and build of their amps, which may also explain why there is still such a big demand for these old Ampeg amplifiers.)

This problem is also present in the Ampeg B-22-X and B-42-X. These amps use the same basic circuit as the B25 and even have the same reference designations for the components in question. The difference between the B25 and these other amps is that the B-22-X and B-42-X have other circuits added, such as reverb, to make them better suited as guitar amps. I haven’t seen this problem in any other Ampeg amps.

How do we fix this? One way would be to plug your instrument into a high pass filter (a filter that only passes frequencies greater than a certain frequency, say 30 Hz in this case) before plugging it into the B25. This is what I did for a while after I first figured out why my 55 Wrms amp kept damaging speakers, even 200 W speakers.

A better way is to change one of the caps inside the amp. I would recommend changing C17. This way you only need to change one cap to affect the response on both channels. If you change C17 from 0.1 microfarads to 0.0047 microfarads, you will limit the low frequency response of this stage to about 32 Hz and the whole amp to about 33 Hz. This will still comfortably pass the lowest note on a standard four string bass. This same change will also work on the Ampeg B-22-X and B-42-X.

Doing this change inside the amp may affect the vintage resale value of the amp. But my feelings are that this stuff is meant to be used, not as museum pieces. Besides, you can always change it back before you sell it.

Notice I haven’t shown any pictures of where these parts are located. Anyone with lots of electronics experience should be able to quickly find the parts based on the schematic. If you don’t have that kind of experience, you probably shouldn’t do these modifications yourself as some of the voltages in these amplifiers, which can be stored for a long time on some of the capacitors even after the amp is off and unplugged, are around 500 V and can be VERY LETHAL! Do yourself a favor and take your amp and these instructions to someone with experience to do the mods for you.

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In a previous rant I argued that the best place to put your money to get safe and high returns is to pay off your debts. But many people who do have a reasonably amount of money saved up will have a difficult time doing this. Why? Because almost all that money is tied up in IRAs and 401(k)s.

Many advisors argue that no where near enough people are taking advantage of these government created means for saving for retirement. I would tend to agree with them that too few take advantage of these plans. But I also think that, of the ones who do take advantage of these means for saving for retirement, most have way too high a percentage of their savings in these plans.

IRAs and 401(k)s are great if the world is perfect and nothing ever goes wrong. But, as we are repeatedly reminded and are really having it rubbed in our faces right now, that is not reality. There are so many restrictions on IRAs and 401(k)s that they are horrendously inflexible. Right now, people with these plans are seeing their value drop very dramatically and have the choice of either accepting the drop or moving the money into fixed income investments, such as bank certificates of deposit (CDs) or Treasury securities, that are paying next to no interest, which is a guaranteed loss after factoring in inflation. But the best thing for most of these people and the economy at large right at this moment is to get rid of as much debt as possible. IRAs and 401(k)s can’t help in this regard without the holders of these plans suffering severe tax penalties.

If you are really serious about saving for retirement, the first thing you should do is to get rid of your debt. The interest you pay on debt is almost always greater than any return you can get on any reasonably safe investment. So you are ahead of the game by avoiding this debt interest. But few financial experts will recommend this path because they and their colleagues make their money off your investments. If you are paying off your debts, you won’t be giving them any of your money to invest.

Paying cash for everything and/or paying off your debts early also flies in the face of the “instant gratification” message being continually pounded into us by the media and, as a consequence of media brainwashing, our peers. Saving up for something is frowned upon by our society. You are called a tightwad, a Scrooge, miserly, and other derogatory terms if you live within your means.

Once debt-free, you next should have at least three months of living expenses in a relatively secure, readily accessible form, such as a checking account, savings account, and/or money market fund to cover possible emergencies. More would be better, especially if you have a rather insecure job or iffy health. But you can’t put everything in these kind of accounts as you will never keep pace with inflation and your money will be continually losing buying power.

Once you have a comfortable amount put away for immediate access for emergencies, then you can start to seriously save for retirement. A better mix for retirement savings is for about half your money to be in IRAs or 401(k)s and the rest in investments outside these government-encouraged plans. This keeps about half your money flexible to respond to any disturbances in the economy or your life with minimum government restrictions and penalties.

If your company offers a generous match for 401(k) contributions, such as dollar for dollar up to 8 % of your paycheck, you may want to take advantage of that before you do any investing outside of the 401(k). But realize that you are setting yourself up for having most of your money tied up in a 401(k). I personally would still match my own 401(k) contributions with the same contributions outside my 401(k) plan. In this case my total savings would 16 % of my paycheck, which shouldn’t be too hard if I am truly living within my means and debt-free.

What is a good mix between fixed income and stock? That depends upon your age, how comfortable you are with risk, etc. There are plenty of good articles and studies on this subject and you should probably seek them out.

Note that I am not a licensed investment professional. This is just based on my own personal observation and experience. I myself have followed this approach and am very happy with the results, even now. I’m just exercising my right to free speech and sharing what has worked for me. But obviously your results may vary and follow at your own risk.

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Right now the economy is not looking too good. Stock values have dropped dramatically and interest rates are approaching 0 %. Where do you put your money to get safe and high returns?

Simple! Pay off your debts. If you are paying 12 % interest on a credit card balance, any dollar you contribute to reduce that balance is effectively earning 12 % interest, since it is reducing your interest payments by that much. If you are paying 7 % interest on a home mortgage, any money you pay towards reducing the principle owed is effectively earning 7 % interest.

Of course, this works best if you are reasonably confident that you can and will eventually pay off the debt in full. If you are afraid there is a good chance of your being layed off in the next month or two, this may not be such a good thing to do, unless you think you can pay these debts off before you get layed off. Fortunately, most of us aren’t in such dire straits.

Paying off your debts is a lot easier than you think. In fact, once you start towards doing it, it becomes almost addictive. Every dollar you reduce your balance owed results in a greater percentage of each future payment being applied towards paying off the balance, speeding up paying off the balance.

I’m speaking from experience here. I had a 30 year mortgage. After three years of normal payments, I had a bank CD come due. I realized if I invested it in any reasonable term new CD, I’d get an interest rate at least a 4 % less than what I was paying on my mortgage. So I put the money toward the principle of my mortgage, which reduced the principle by about 10 %. Suddenly, instead of another 27 years of normal mortgage payments remaining, I only had 19 years. A few months later I had another CD mature worth about 5 % of my initial mortgage. I applied it towards my mortgage, which was reduced to less than 16 years. Soon I was putting every spare penny possible towards paying off the mortgage, which was paid off less than three years after making that first supplemental payment.

You have absolutely no idea how free you feel as when you first become debt-free. My living expenses dropped very dramatically as each debt was paid off. You feel incredibly rich on very little income.

One of the best ways to help the homeless in general is to make sure you don’t become one of them. They can’t take your home from you once you own it free and clear, unless you don’t pay your property taxes. But since part of your mortgage payment is probably escrow towards your property taxes, these taxes should be significantly less than your total mortgage payment and much easier to come up with.

Many “experts” argue against paying off your mortgage early. But most of these “experts” have a stake in you not paying off your mortgage early. Bankers make money off your interest payments. Realtors know that people who own their homes free and clear are less likely to sell their houses or assume new debt (hence, less business for realtors), plus there is no old mortgage for a potential buyer to assume, giving the realtor less flexibility in selling your house (though it does reduce your future risks). Investment advisors make money off the money you give them to invest, and any money you apply to paying off your mortgage is money they can’t invest and, consequently, make money off of.

Some will argue that you lose a tax break by not having a mortgage. I personally found that for every dollar I saved in taxes, I had to pay at least four dollars in interest. Even if you are already eligible to itemize your deductions and in the highest tax bracket, you have to pay almost three dollars in interest for every dollar you save in taxes. If you think this is a good deal, I have a bunch of $1 bills I’ll sell to you for $3 each (Don’t you suddenly feel very stupid?).

For years, many have lamented the high amount of debt that the average American household has. Others have argued that this high debt is countered by the vast retirement savings many of these households have. But the value of the debt is fixed whereas most of the savings, as we have been recently painfully reminded, is on paper and based on faith in the market. It is this high average debt that has led to such dire market conditions. So, do yourself and the country at large a favor and get rid of as much of your debt as you can. If you have ANY debt, YOU are the cause of today’s problems.

Note that I am not a licensed investment professional. This is just based on my own personal observation and experience. I myself have followed this advice and am very happy with the results. I’m just exercising my right to free speech and sharing what has worked for me. But obviously your results may vary and follow at your own risk.

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Housing market collapsed. The stock market drops almost 40 % in one year. Major banks failing or about to fail. It seems like capitalism doesn’t work.

WRONG!! Most all of this was caused by seemingly well intentioned government intervention into the market place eventually screwing it up. And recent government behavior in the past few months looks like they are only going to make it worse.

First, way back in the mid 1930’s during the “Great Depression,” some people felt that it was not right for someone to work their whole life only to find themselves destitute when they were no longer able to work because some disturbance in the economy destroyed their savings. So the US government created Social Security (Socialist Security?) to fix this problem.

The result of this is that eventually many people cut back or even stopped saving for retirement. After all, the government’s Social Security program was going to cover all of their retirement needs, or at least that is what many thought.

Some time later someone felt that everyone should own their own home and the government should somehow encourage this. Thus an income tax deduction for interest on home mortgage payments was born. Soon this deduction included all interest payments.

This resulted in people cutting back on saving up for anything and just borrowing for anything they wanted. This, when combined with Social Security, caused saving rates to plummet.

People noticed this low saving rate and high consumer debt. So they tried to get rid of the income tax deduction for interest payments. But too many were now dependent upon these deductions, so getting rid of all of them was political suicide. So they got rid of most of them but kept the home mortgage interest deduction. Creative people found how to get most other debt covered by this deduction by bundling them into home equity loans. So consumer debt was able to continue growing.

People also noticed that the Social Security program wasn’t bringing in enough money through payroll deductions to cover its future costs. Raising payroll deductions or cutting back on benefits is political suicide, so only a little bit of each of these things was done, just enough to push the problem out a few years for someone else to try to solve. Instead, the government created the IRA and 401(k) plans to encourage people to save for retirement to cover this eventual Social Security shortfall.

But now companies noticed that if they could get all their employees to participate in 401(k)s or IRAs, these companies could cut back or even eliminate their own employee pension plans, saving these companies lots of money. So now a lot less people are covered by pensions and are dependent upon these IRAs and 401(k)s.

Then in the 2001, people noticed the economy was headed for a recession. So rather than accept reality, the government decided to try to force interest rates to artificially low levels to try to avoid the recession. This plan did probably reduce the depth and impact of the economic downturn. But it also encouraged people to buy much bigger houses than they could ordinarily afford. It also encouraged people to simply buy multiple properties as investments. This superheated the housing and construction markets.

A few years later interest rates started to return to more historic levels. Suddenly all these people with variable rate mortgages were seeing their interest rates and, consequently, monthly payments skyrocket. These people could no longer afford their oversized homes and investment properties, and they couldn’t sell them, either, since these properties were no longer such a good deal and few were buying. Both the housing markets and the construction markets collapsed. But this also took down the financial markets, who lent all this money for these mortgages which were now being defaulted. This made money tight for anyone who would ever need to borrow money. Now virtually every company was having money problems.

Consequently, almost all stocks dropped in value. This caused most all IRAs and 401(k)s to lose significant value. So the government tried to force interest rates to artificially low levels to try to repeat the supposed success from a couple years earlier. This caused the remaining IRAs and 401(k)s to lose value.

Now people are fearing that they have worked their whole lives only to find themselves destitute when they are no longer able to work because of some disturbance in the economy destroyed their savings and Social Security will be bankrupt when they need it. Huh? Doesn’t this sound familiar? We have sure made a lot of progress these past 70-some years of government tinkering with the economy!?!

What is the government doing now? Making massive amounts of money available for bailing out these companies that are troubled. Where are they getting this money? They hope to borrow it. But what if there isn’t enough money out there in the marketplace to borrow or those who have the money don’t want to lend it due to lack of confidence in getting paid back, low interest rates, etc.? The government will have to try to jack up interest rates to try to attract lenders (Didn’t they just drop interest rates?). If this doesn’t work, they will have to print money, which would cause inflation to skyrocket (Ready to pay $1,000,000 for a loaf of bread? They are paying more than that in some countries, like Zimbabwe, that have tried this).

So what are we to do? I don’t know. The government has so disrupted the economy and is so intertwined into it now that it can’t simply pull completely out right now without total economic collapse. This shows the severe consequences of politicians “tweaking” the economy for short term political gain. We need to look for solutions that reduce, not increase, government involvement into the economy. The fact that some people will be hurt in the short term is virtually unavoidable any way we go. But I feel that increasing government involvement for a hoped for reduction in short term pain is probably only going to increase the pain for most of us down the road.

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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 amps listed above have the selectable center frequencies set for about 300 Hz, 1000 Hz, and 3000 Hz.

If you want to change the center frequencies of your midrange to match those of the SVT, you only need to change two capacitors. In the SVT, these capacitors have the reference designations C16 and C19 and are each 0.68 microfarads. In all the other above listed amps, the reference designations for the corresponding caps are C203 and C204, each of which are 0.33 microfarads. Simply change both C203 and C204 to 0.68 microfarads. (See http://www.drtube.com/guitamp.htm for the schematic of your Ampeg amp. The Ampeg schematics have the reference designations.)

0.68 microfarad capacitors with a 400 V minimum breakdown voltage may be hard to find. You could just parallel another 0.33 microfarad, 400 V minimum, capacitor, which should be easier to find, across each of the present C203 and C204 capacitors. The 0.02 microfarad, or 3 %, difference in capacitance is well within the tolerance of the parts and is negligible.

You could also add a switch which parallels the new 0.33 microfarad capacitors across the exiting ones. This way you can change from the stock V4 center frequencies to the SVT center frequencies with the flick of a switch. Be sure you use a double pole, single throw switch that switches both caps together. Also, be careful with your wire routing to the switch so you don’t increase the noise in your amp.

Note that all this applies only to the V4s that don’t have the distortion control. The late 1970’s V4s and VT22s with the distortion control have a much different circuit which I haven’t analyzed and have no experience with.

Notice I haven’t shown any pictures of where these parts are located. Anyone with lots of electronics experience should be able to quickly find the parts based on the schematic. If you don’t have that kind of experience, you probably shouldn’t do these modifications yourself as some of the voltages in these amplifiers, which can be stored for a long time on some of the capacitors even after the amp is off and unplugged, are well over 500 V and can be VERY LETHAL! Do yourself a favor and take your amp and these instructions to someone with experience to do the mods for you.

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