Quest for large tone in a low wattage tube amp?
Tired of playing with pedals to get good distortion?
I've put a lot of time in tweaking and tuning to get it...
SEL-2 PROJECT amp for sale.
I want to sell it to fund more amps, and the prototype works great.
2x 12AX7, single 6SN7GTA vintage Sylvania power tube.
This amp is a derivative of the single ended project amps popularly found at AX84. I have made it "my design" by tweaking cap and resistor values and other changes to get a fuller sound at very low volume.
All parts contained within are new. Weber power transformer, Weber WSE15 output transformer. Weber Mallory 150 style capacitors. Elon electrolytics. Resistors are metal film and high temp wirewound.
Construction is eyelet board hand wired. There is a bias pot inside, but not really needed, as the amp is cathode biased to the 6SN7 GTA or GTB with no problems. Output is estimated at 5 watts. The power stage is full
wave bridge diode rectified from a non center tapped power transformer.
I believe this provides a tighter sound, not mushy when driven hard.
Sounds range from passable clean at low volume to a nice warm overdriven classic Marshall crunch. The best feature of this amp is the usable range at low volumes. Vintage Fender tweed is there, Vox smoothness, just depends on how you tweak the two gain controls and the master volume. It is touch responsive at lower gain settings, giving that "boutique amp" feel with the amount of distortion controlled by your guitar's volume.
Controls are Master volume, treble,mid,bass, gain1, gain2.
The two gain controls are tied directly to the two preamp tubes, so even more possibilities are opened up by swapping the 12AX's to 12AT's or lower to get more clean sounds. The tone controls are very independent and EQ-like in their quality, not affecting the volume much when tweaked.
The amp has plenty of bite if one desires, I rarely turn the mid or treble up more than halfway.
Sounds best through a single 12" cab, better with a 2x12 or 4x12.
Speaker outputs are 4, 8, or 16 ohm. User could modify one output for a line out in addition to the speaker output.
$435.00 USD shipped CONUS only.
Pix and a sound clip are here:
Cygnus SEL Lead Amp
Cygnus SEL-2 4 Sale
Threaded Mode
