Are Hand Wired Amps Really Better?

[Applause] [Music] for instance for instance um got two amps that look identical really almost so this is a 65 reissue princeton reverb this is kind of your standard reissue black face fender and then this is a 1964 custom hand wired princeton so the difference between the two is actually way more than it looks like but even though they share the same controls the circuit is slightly different the components are different and i think you'll see that they react quite a bit different as well to how you play how the knobs work everything else so price is quite a bit different too so i guess you have to decide on that so i guess the main thing we're testing out today is hand wired versus non-hand wired right yeah yeah this is fender's hand-wired version of this amplifier the speakers are different um but beyond that i mean they are very much for instance and both of them share the same tube complement you know same power same control layout everything so for someone who doesn't know about hand wired versus non-handwired what what's the difference mainly like what are you getting in a non-hand wired amp and what are you getting in a hand-wired amp well properly non-hand wired amp is perfectly fine there's nothing wrong with them they i mean it's you design a circuit and if you can lay it out on a pc board on some kind of circuit board you can replicate that over and over and over without any questions right the beauty of handward stuff it's easy to work on it's hard to break um it looks super cool but tonally i don't know that you're gonna get any like huge wind just because something's hand wired these two particular amps do sound quite a bit different but i think there's more a foot than just the hand wired aspect of it uh we won't be able to see the circuit without pulling the chassis out which we can do wow that's beautiful wow i do love looking hand wired amps it's so cool i mean even if there was no difference other than that just for the sheer fact of just craftsmanship that's impressive it's really pretty gorgeous gorgeous work okay so i have to interrupt the video here because something cool happened yesterday when we were at righteous guitars shooting this video i posted a story on my instagram showing the guts of the two amps and i got a reply from a subscriber here on the channel robert pierce now robert has been subscribed to this channel for a really long time he's a good friend of the channel and he actually works at fender in california building amps and he uh he actually built that amp he made the amp he wired the amp that we're using in this video i thought that was super cool so i'll have his instagram link down below you guys can go uh give him a shout out and you're about to hear his handiwork all right let's check out the other one all right so what's going on here well first off i'm blown away that to me this is beautiful for a guitar geek that's gorgeous job they did wiring that up this is great too you know but what you're seeing here is if you look at the actual components right you can see this like this cap it's directly wired to a turret that's joining it to its next component so each of these are joined together by a hard wired solder point right every wire is soldered directly to the next piece all the potentiometers right here let's say you drop your amp right and then you bang one of your pots this isn't attached to any kind of circuit board to break or damage as opposed to let's say you drop this or bang into it these potentiometers are wired directly this board you may damage that board which means that needs to be replaced as opposed to just going to your local shop and grabbing the part and putting it in there you'll notice here this is still a clean design but it's traced out on the back so there's a it's more of a board so it'll look kind of more like this and they're joining things together with these clips instead of actually hand soldering it they just have a little little guy that they can dip in a solder bath and then come back through and plug them in this is not a bad looking amplifier and in fact this is a really good amp but they do share a lot of similarities they're clearly not the same type of components though these caps yeah they're very similar but if you start looking at the rest of it where they've kind of just used more you know out of the box type of stuff over there they clearly spent some money you know using branded nicer versions of a lot of those parts so overall that's just a much cleaner look to me i mean look at this like is that functional yeah it's functional the one over here though while it's the same thing look how tight and clean it is that's a stupid detail but it makes a difference there was more attention paid to that amp at the final assembly than there was to this amplifier do you have a different speaker there's an el nico speaker in the hand wire and there's a ceramic you know so we will need to we'll need to run them through the same speaker don't tell me what you thought because i don't want any confirmation bias okay good so what i'll do we'll shoot them out in there yes and then you and i will get together and compare notes and see if we thought the same things is that great sounds perfect all right so so i should point out that uh we did just pull the chassis out of both of these amps don't do that at home amplifiers and amp circuits are crazy dangerous the capacitors inside both of those amps can hold enough charge to really really do some damage so uh you know i would not recommend cracking your amp open at home and taking a look at it just uh use your imagination or watch watch this video again if you want to know more about it so we're putting these back in the uh the cabinets we just noticed that this is the hand wired one that's the non-hand wired they're the same part number same transformers which is really cool yeah so bold move right we'll see uh we'll see what what impact that has and the same tubes same tubes yeah so same tubes same transformers it really does come down to the circuit wiring and the speakers and the cabinets but we're gonna we're gonna play them through both speakers so we can compare them direct head to head so we're trying to isolate just this we got going on here i'm putting a little little thing so we can jump those speakers okay so we're gonna shoot these two out i'm playing my strat which conveniently was already here because i have the guys that right just plick it for me uh and we're gonna start with the non-hand wired normal off the shelf princeton we're gonna start with both amp on five so this is volume five treble five base five and we're gonna compare the two flat line then we'll get into swapping speakers and seeing how close we can get them if at all i think there's going to be quite a bit of difference here especially in the reverb and the tremolo sounds but see how it does [Music] so [Music] [Music] oh [Music] [Laughter] [Music] so [Music] [Music] okay so we kind of compared the two roughly based on the same control settings and now i'm going to dial in a sound that i really like on the hand wired one and see if i can match it with the non-hand wired one and then once we're done with that i'm going to go and play them through the same speaker so right now i've got a sound pulled up that i like this is probably how i would run this amp [Music] [Music] normally sounds good edge of breakup so if you dig in it'll it'll break up so now let's see if i can get close with the first thing [Music] [Music] yes [Music] [Music] yeah this to me is doing something [Music] that's a lot more mid-scooped to me the non-hand wired version this has a nice mid-range presence that i'm really digging overall to me this one sounds far superior in the room but that very well could be because of the speaker so next what we're going to do is take this speaker cable that ben just made and we're gonna patch that amp into that cabinet [Music] hmm [Music] hmm [Music] [Music] um [Music] okay so it's clear to me it's clear that the hand wired through its own cabin speaker sounds best i think by far and away i 100 agree this amp sounds quite a bit better than that amp in every respect the re-rip sounds better the tremolo sounds better it breaks up better the mid-range content is that you could gig with this amp in a small gig that would be tough this would be tough um the same sounds good i think so too but it's got a mid-scoop thing and it's too bright it's very harsh in the top end yeah it's really bright it's really bright especially with a strap it's it's too cool that's right like we talked talk about like in a fan environment because of the mid-range content of that you'll be able to hear it through the mix that's going to go away to me you're just going to get lost right yeah but that amp with that speaker and cabinet you can prove it big improvement big improvement a lot of the mid-range came back tamed a lot of the high end you got a little bit more of that low end punch that this amp naturally has i don't think it was as good as the hand wire but it was much closer i felt like it's still pretty bright but it regained some of the it wasn't scooped anymore so still i still thought it was brighter than this amp overall yeah and it wasn't as mid-range as that but man if you have a princeton and you want a 65 you want to improve it like instantly go buy it on eco 10 and put it in there yeah boom that's like that's a huge improvement massive improvement and what's the price difference between these two thirteen hundred dollars that's thirteen you can buy two of those for the price of one of these yeah that's a substantial part now granted usa made hand wired in corona california those are made over right across an ensenada yeah um ceramic speaker el nico speaker circuit board your handwrap i've already said but yeah it's a substantial amount more money since or not well i think it depends on what type of gigs you're doing if you're just going down once a week to your local bar why wouldn't you yeah why wouldn't you use that if you're traveling though and it's going in and out of trailers it's going in and out of cases it's getting moved around by brodies and stagehands that one all day every day because it's worth the extra focus that is worth the extra money because it's easily serviceable it's it's less likely to have any kind of catastrophic failure when the amp is dropped or kicked around not if well so for example we went to the speaker swap out and soldered that real quick thing together real fast like that that's how fast you could replace a potentiometer in this amp right it's not going to go like that with this amp right so yeah you're absolutely right on the road serviceability that's even just in general a hobbyist could service this app yep does hand wire make a difference kind of i mean i saw my audio though like less on the sonic side right yeah it's more about reliability and uh serviceability yeah yeah and it looks cool if you ever take the chassis out it looks really cool uh you know what here is a very valid thing if you wanted to make that amp your own right this is a very easy ant for your tinkerer to get in there and change values of things and modify the crap out of it that is not so that that's actually a super power point you could make this amp scream you could make it do all kinds of different stuff and because of the way it's laid out those parts i mean it's you can see it right you can easily learn if you take something like a champ like this simple simple circuit you can kind of figure out how everything works and what you can change to modify the amount of gain or how the tone stack works put a marshall tone stack in it so there is that side of it if you're a tweaker and you really want to make it your own then there's no question that hand wire is right yeah can't see my face so hand-wired versus non-hand wire it's an interesting comparison it's one that i've been wanting to do for a really long time and i thought the results were actually a lot different than i thought there would be but let me know what you think down in the comments section below this video which amp did you prefer and did you think that there's a 1200 price difference between those two amplifiers if you want to support the channel check out the links in the description box down below you can sign up for the green room down there we now have two levels of support for the green room and you can check out my video courses down below as well i'll also have affiliate links to the gear we used in these videos and these two amps so if you want to check them out down below you can get more information on those those are affiliate links so if you buy something through that i earn a small commission which really helps me out in making these videos anyways that's gonna do it for today's video thanks for watching my name is rhett shull and remember there is no plan b

Channel: Rhett Shull

Views: 347,262

Rating: 4.8356571 out of 5

Keywords: fender princeton, princeton reverb, tube amp, fender amps, fender amp, 68 custom, 64 princeton reverb, fender guitar, 64 custom deluxe reverb, rhett shull amp, Rhett Shull, Schull, fender amp settings

Id: OHrwITnvFfY

Length: 18min 13sec (1093 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 28 2020