Alternatives to the Brown Box?

[EddieDavis]

Any guitar plucking friends out there use a voltage regulator for your amp?

I had someone send me the demo on the Brown Box and it sounds awesome, but it seems like for something like that you could get into it for less than $350. 

Are there any poor man's voltage regulator hacks I could use for my amp instead of buying something that's marked up and marketed to look like another fancy piece of floor candy???  :blob7:

 

[Cagey]

A proper regulator/surge suppressor/noise filter sized to source a 100W amp should actually cost more than that, which leads me to believe the "Brown Box" isn't quite the magical widget it claims to be.

For instance, a 500VA constant voltage transformer from SOLA all by itself with no connections, controls, readouts, or even an enclosure will run you upwards of a $1,000. Any device less than that is probably snake oil, or woefully inadequate.

This is unfortunately true of most commonly available "line conditioners". They're designed to separate the frightened from their wallet's contents. Most of them are the equivalent of using kite string for arresting wires on an aircraft carrier. The power supplies in 99% of the devices out there often already have more filtering/conditioning/immunity circuitry built into them than the aftermarket devices sold to perform that duty. Some of them even go so far as to give you guarantees or insurance against powerline damage up to some ridiculous number, like $10K or $100K. Yeah. Right. Try collecting on a loss. First thing they'll say is "Prove it!" Assuming you can, which is highly unlikely, they'll point to how the specs were exceeded and therefore uncovered.

If instead of protection your aim is to deliberately lower the feed to your amp in order to get some dubious sonic improvement, what you want is a "Variac". There again, they're not cheap, even as a standalone component, let alone packaged up fancy.

So, I guess what I'm saying is, quit looking at that crap unless you have millions of dollars you just can't spend fast enough and are looking for pits to shovel it into :laughing7:

 

[mayfly]

you could certainly shovel some of that money my way 

But seriously (folks), what are you trying to achieve with this thing?  :dontknow:

 

[Tonar8352]

I first got interested in one after I saw a Derek Trucks rig rundown and they are using it with his Alessandro amps. I have had one for about a month now and I cannot say enough good things about it. You can really hear the difference in vintage tweed amps that are made to see 110V. The church I play my Super Reverb at runs 124V at the wall and the amps wants to see 117. It sounds better but mostly it runs way cooler. If you have tube amps it is worth looking into, I think it is the best $350.00 I have spent recently.

Here is a good video of Johhny Hiland demonstrating one on you tube. I have found it does exactly what he says.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-gaSeS6Nu8w&t=78s

 

[Cagey]

That's an infomercial. He's telling you what you hear, and how much better it is. He's not being a dick about it or anything, so you believe him.

If you listen close, nothing is changing. He's just saying it's changing.

The power of suggestion. It's a thing.

 

[EddieDavis]

I first got interested in one after I saw a Derek Trucks rig rundown and they are using it with his Alessandro amps. I have had one for about a month now and I cannot say enough good things about it. You can really hear the difference in vintage tweed amps that are made to see 110V. The church I play my Super Reverb at runs 124V at the wall and the amps wants to see 117. It sounds better but mostly it runs way cooler.

Since I'm getting an SR and want to take great care of it, I assume not running it too hot is in my best interest?  I'm new to vintage amps and so I just don't know what I'm doing. So for that reason I'm interested in using something that will help it run most efficiently in any building - if indeed it will protect my investment.  Not concerned about making the Super Reverb sound better, it already sounds awesome!  But the gear protection factor with an amp like that is important.

My wife is an industrial electrician and when I showed her the demo video, she just said that $350 Brown Box is doing the same thing any Voltage Regulator could do. 

It's all basically Chinese to me at this point.  I'm just a player looking for great tone!  But I will have dropped a decent amount of bills on this amp so I wanna do everything I can to keep it in excellent working condition forever!  (NEVER selling it!!!)

:sign13:

 

[mayfly]

If your wife is an electrician, get her to source and install a super power transformer with the correct primary winding. 
Here's one:  https://www.hammfg.com/part/290DX?referer=1063 
At $150 bucks at Mouser it's less than half of that brown box.  and it's not made in China.  http://ca.mouser.com/ProductDetail/Hammond-Manufacturing/290DX/?qs=HhoUExdhPFmHI1an4NEjZg%3D%3D

Or before you even do that, just check that the B+ voltages are in spec.  If they are, then don't do anything.

 

[Cagey]

I don't want to say your worries are baseless, but you should understand that tube amp electronics are very robust as the voltages and temperatures they operate at normally are brutal and they have to withstand that on top of bone-jarring vibration. Most electronics would die somewhere between instantly and very fast under the conditions you'll find in a tube-based amp every moment of their existence.

Musicians like to think the two tube facories left on the planet are there to serve their needs, but if they were the only ones still using tubes, it wouldn't be for long. The only reason tubes still exist is because the Russians and the Chinese still use them for a lot of their military equipment. Why? Well, partly because they're poor and backwards and their economic model doesn't encourage a lotta innovation, but a lot of it has to do with tube circuitry being able to withstand battlefield conditions.

A tube-based amp is much more likely to die of old age or mechanical abuse than any kind of injury from temperature or powerline issues. They can be banged around too much in moving, dropped down stairs or off vehicles, knocked over or pushed off stages, etc. Or, the transformers will eventually develop shorts between windings that will cause them to overheat and burn, and capacitors will dry up, become conductive, and explode. This will happen to the amp even if you bought it new in 1965 and left it sealed up in the shipping box until this coming weekend. It's just the nature of the beast due to the components involved. The biggest fear most guys who buy old vintage amps have is powering it up for the first time. Not because it may not work - anything can be repaired if you throw enough money at it - but because they may be watching it die moments after they flip the switch.

Not trying to frighten you or anything, just bring you up to speed on the reality of old tube amps. It's kinda like buying a classic car. A '67 Camaro with a 427 under the hood may be worthy of some serious lust and drool, but even if it was garaged new in 1967 and never driven, it would have lots of problems in 2017. If it started at all, it probably wouldn't run more than a couple minutes before a hose, belt, gasket or cable let go.

So, don't worry about it. It is what it is - an old amp. If it hasn't been done already, you'll probably want to change the power supply filter caps and any other electrolytics in the thing, but other than that, keeping it alive is just going to be an ongoing war of attrition until you finally can't get tubes or transformers for it.

 

[mayfly]

One last thing - you should check your line voltages just to see if you even need to make any changes at all.  Voltages in my neck of the woods don't get over 115 VAC.  If you're in the same ball park, then it's wasted money.

 

[EddieDavis]

One last thing - you should check your line voltages just to see if you even need to make any changes at all.  Voltages in my neck of the woods don't get over 115 VAC.  If you're in the same ball park, then it's wasted money.

Thanks for the tips guys!

We'll check voltages first before doing anything else.  I've gotten to play the amp 3 or 4 times at the shop and it's in great shape so I may not need to do anything. 

I agree the biggest thing is common sense stuff, like not dropping it!  And not letting any dude Bros place a pitcher of brewskie on top of it!!!  Yikes! ccasion14:

 

 

[T89Rex]

All this talk of voltages has got me thinking. If, as manufacturers of things like the Brown Box seem to claim, wall voltage affects the sound of the amp, do valve amps sound different in the 230/240V parts of the world? Is the circuitry different to accommodate the difference or is there something like a stepdown transformer built in in front of the 110V circuit?

 

[Cagey]

Actually, the power transformer in a tube amp both increases and decreases the voltages used internally. Nominally, there's a low voltage winding for the tube filaments, and a high voltage winding for the plate supply. There may be other windings for other things, but usually not in something as simple as an amp. Those are all called "secondary" windings, and have to be at the voltages they are for things to work right.

The side that connects to your supply power is called the "primary" winding, and there's always one, but sometimes it's tapped. Depending how you wire a tapped primary, you can supply it with different voltages and still always get the same voltages on the secondaries.

Transformers usually have direct and proportional linear relationships between the primary and secondary windings, with the transformation from one voltage to another dependent on the ratio of windings on the primary side to the secondary side. So, just to put numbers on it, if the primary has 100 turns of wire and the secondary has 10, putting 120 volts on the primary will result in 12 volts showing up on the secondary. You can go in the other direction as well. That is, if the primary has 10 turns and the secondary has 100, then putting 120 volts on the primary will cause 1200 volts to show up on the secondary. As mentioned before, you can have multiple secondaries, each with a different ratio to the primary, so you can get a bunch of different voltages out of the thing with a single input voltage. That's why you sometimes see a large bundle of wires coming out of a transformer.

That all leads us to why the different primary voltage in different parts of the world don't change the sound. The transformer is sized to create the same internal voltages even though there are different primary voltages. They just wind them with different ratios, or use taps to effect the same thing.