Psionic audio (on here) goes into this in great depth as an amp repair tech. Not all “handwired” amps are created equal though so caveat emptor. Being guitar players y’all should check out his channel he goes into great detail about pros and cons of many guitar amps and what it takes to repair them. I don’t even play guitar and find it interesting. 😊

As an amp tech and a guitarist for 40 plus years I’ve seen amplifiers from many manufacturers, the good and the bad. Sometimes it’s not so much the build quality but an individual components that was not the best choice for a particular function. Back in the early 2000’s all the IC capacitors for every manufacturer, including computers and other electronics failed early on. The circuit boards were easy to get too and replace them. Now on some amps they are very difficult to disassemble and repair and the repairs can be costly. Why Gibson didn’t do a better job on these new amps is troubling. It’s their debut amp and it a very small and an easy circuit to build point to point. I feel if they had done that , even for more money in the long run there would be more positive results. Also anyone with a circuit board amp should have an amp tech remove the high voltage power supply spade connectors and directly solder them to the board. Johnathan that’s what gets hot and eventually will damage the board. Hopefully Gibson didn’t make you guys buy too many.

Check out the Marshall UK factory tour where Phil, former technical guy who says, if the amp has the same components, pcb or handwired, there is no difference. He said if customers want to pay more for handwired, that’s ok for Marshall

Me and my brother have been praying for more than 30 years. We both agree just play what you like and don’t worry about buzz words.

Baxter: “You can’t always hear it, but it’s better!” Always the salesman! 🤣

I had a feeling something like this was coming after some light was shed on the way a "certain new amp" was being labeled

I’ve had countless tube amps in nearly 50 years of playing. The only amp I ever had to fail was a fully hand-wired “boutique” amp. By far the most expensive amp I ever owned…and by far the least dependable. Obviously, I didn’t keep it.

Self built and hand wired! Fun to build and fun to use. I've built Tube-Depot kits and Mojotone kits... They sound amazing.

u guys are great! love the real talk!

I have an Amplified Nation amplifier that uses a dense circuit board, but the amp is designed, laid out, and made impeccably. Great amp. So, having a circuit board is not the the worst thing.

Those new Gibson amps causing internet furor.

Baxter's Freudian slip, " I play a lot of hand wired amps"....... drinking champagne like a good tycoon...... and playing in one of his Two Rocks..... or old vintage Fenders...........lol

I own 4 full tube bass amps. I love them all. An 81 Bassman 70, an 83 Bassman Ten, and the 2013 Bassman 100t and Super Bassman. The modern Bassman amps have all sorts of tech that make them extremely versatile and they both sound great. (I only use the “vintage” channels on them. That said, 95% of the gigs it’s the old 80s Bassman amps that make the gig. There’s just something about them.

hand built- whatever parts are put together. Hand wired-built with turrent boards, or PCB. Point to point-each component wired directly to the next one sans eyelet and turrents etc.

Two of my three tube amps are hand wired point to point. My main reason for buying both of these is for reliability, not tone. When you run vacuum tubes through a PCB, you depend on that PCB to carry all the heater current those tubes require to perform. That current turns into heat, and as pointed out in the video, after a lot of usage, those PCBs begin warping and then your solder runs begin to weaken and break.

Great video on this topic. I do remember Johnathan's older video he mentioned. I'd love a good hand wired amp if for no better reason than it would be easy to fix. I wouldn't be afraid to even try and deal with it myself. I had to replace a fuse, and tubes in my ac10 (pcb) but if something else happens to it, it wouldn't be worth fixing.

I am an engineer and guitarist who has been been working on tube amps since the mid-seventies. PCBs have their place, but all of the amps that have survived from those days have chassis-mounted tube sockets. None of the big name amps we love were ever point-to-point, except for maybe the pre-Tweed amps and Matchless amps from the nineties. With true point-to-point circuitry, the components are mounted on terminal strips, tube sockets, pots, and jacks and wired directly to each other; hence, point-to-point. This style of circuitry is error prone, laborious, and prone to parasitic oscillation. Hand-wired just means that there is no printed circuit board (PCB) whatsoever. A PCB is a copper-clad board where the component interconnects are made via traces on the board. The traces on the board have history been made by printing the circuit on the board using a light-based photo resist technique and then developed and etched. A point-to-point wired amp is hand-wired. A turret board-based amp like an old Hiwatt or early Marshall is hand-wired. The pre-1980s Fender Tweed, Brown, Blonde, Black, and Silver amps eyelet board-based amps are hand-wired. Anything that uses a PCB is either a hybrid amp or a straight-up PCB amp. When Marshall switched from turret board-mounted components to PCB-mounded components in the seventies, they used a hybrid approach with the jacks, pots, and tube sockets mounted to the chassis and wired to the PCB with flying leads. This type of PCB construction is very solid, but it is not considered to be hand-wired. Fender did kind of the same thing with the reissue amps, except for the pots and jacks are PCB mounted. Let's get down to brass tacks. Anyone who is looking for amp that will last and be relatively easy to service should steer clear of any Mesa amp with PCB-mounted power tube sockets. That pretty much includes all of the EL84-based amps and most of the 6L6/EL34-based models that were built after the DC series. These amps are made to a price point and to be easy to build. They are not designed for board-level repair. They are designed to have entire sub-assemblies replaced in the event of failure. That means all of these amps have limited shelf lives. Mesa has truly been living off of the reputation they built with the early Mark series. Almost all other modern PCB-based amps are disposable junk, regardless of whose name is one the front of the amp. I do not care how heavy the weight of the copper plating is on the PCB. When a board-mounted power tube shorts, it usually takes the socket and the board with it. Sometimes, a repairman can jumper the burned traces on the PCB, but more often than not, the PCB is toast. That is why I tell people to stick to tube amps that have at least chassis-mounted power tubes. What has been sold to guitarists that is little more than myth is that hand-wired amps sound better than their PCB-based counterparts. That is only true in some cases because there is so much labor involved in building a hand-wired amp that the builders usually use higher quality, tighter specified components; therefore, hard-wired equals better tone is merely snake oil. My father was also an engineering professional. He started working in electronics in 1951. He would often laugh when I showed him the nonsense boutique builders were spouting in the early days such as the superiority of carbon composition resistors. They used carbon composition in the early days because that is all they had to use. Yes, carbon composition resisters are non-inductive, but that is really only a concern at radio frequencies, not audio frequencies.

I have both 64 custom Princeton and deluxe reverb the best amps I ever had they sound and never had a problem with both and also put rca tubes in both it made the amp sound way better then the groove tubes

I have a hand wired Bruno cowtipper 45! It’s an absolutely flawless amp.

I learned more on a topic in the last 15 minutes than I did in any college class taking 3 months. ; )

The pcb issues mentioned are bad design and component choices. A good pcb can be better than a turret or eyelet board as you can control the traces and grounds much better and more consistently. Also, a good PCB can have components easily replaced if they aren't SMD. The hot hod series and blus jrs are both full of bad design choices. The reissue amps are better, but have plenty of room for improvement.

I have a hand wired amp and it’s beautiful. I wish I could have a clear back cover to be able to see it whenever. The guy that built it showed me a couple of garage operation boutique amp builders that make ugly and probably dangerous hand wired amps Suhr makes PCB amps that look pretty cool and are solid! I’d love to have an Hombre! “Cork sniffer vibes” is probably correct. Once you’re playing with a band the advantages of an expensive amp aren’t as obvious and a lot of cheap amps are good, until they aren’t. I’ll admit I’m a snob about some things: coffee, whiskey, guitar stuff. I like to enjoy nice things, when I can afford to

I love my Goodsell Super 17.

I get the beauty of point to point hand wired, especially if you're a gigging/touring musician who's amp may need repairs from the heavy duty use. A tech can open it, easily replace the bad component and you're on your way... but I'm not really buying the whole tonal characteristics of pcbs being less than desirable. I have a hand wired Princeton and a Classic 30. Both sound amazing. I know which one is more “disposable” or really just would be harder to repair, but there's nothing wrong with the sound of the Peavey. Also, I've stated here in the comments that as a teen in the early 80s I'd sit in an enclosed living room and listen to my guitar teacher's band practice at volume, and my teacher was pushing air with two 50 watt Marshall JCM800 heads and four 4X12s. It's the tone that was literally driven into my head that all other are compared to, and those heads were pcb in that era. Nobody was complaining about the tone... except his neighbor who kept calling the police.

4:38 better signal flow? Guess I’ll start soldering my cable into the guitar and into the amp. And the speaker to the amp.

It’s nice to see Baxter’s son in these videos randomly.

You showed a Matchless with Phil Jamison’s name in it but didn’t mention Matchless. I have one and it’s incredibly sweet to play. I use a Deluxe Tonemaster because it’s plenty good for gigging and light as a feather!

I just bought a Les Paul Tribute. I'm not filthy rich, so hence the Tribute. It doesn't have all the ginger bread. It's just a plain Jane L.P. Which is fine with me because it's a real made in the U.S.A. Gibson Les Paul. I do my own setups. Something all guitarists need to learn. I had to open the tone and volume to see the date on the C.T.S. pots. And to my disbelief, there was a P.C.B. I wish it was just wired like in the past. Idk if this is a good thing or not. It sounds like a real Les Paul. Im not convinced if I like it or not. Idk after time if it sounds the same. I just don't know if I like it or not. If it doesn't change the tone, and if Gibson can save a little money. Then I guess. But I'm not sold on it. And there's no way I could repair it.

As a bassist, give me solid state. Nothing against tubes (I love them too), but why carry a heavy tube amp when solid state weights so much less for the same power. I have a 40 year old SUNN Beta I use every day for practice, and I play loud.

PCB baby!

Not all PCB's are created equal

One of the problems, people don't realize amps need to be serviced/maintained after a certain amount of hours. It is no different than a car. If you don't know how to do it, you have to drop it off with an amp tech. Its better to spend 100 or 200 bucks instead of several hundred. Or, worst case, having to scrap a 1,500+ amp and buy another 1,500+ amp

I had a Mesa Boogie Subway Rocket that cooked a circuit board. It worked, but smelled bad after 10 minutes. Mesa factory repair can give you an estimate for "badly burnt PC board damage" - You have to send them a photo to get an estimate. It's a common problem with Mesa amps LOL. Price for repair was quite reasonable, even when you include shipping.

Some PCB amps aren't bad. Look at Suhr amps. Their PCBs are good quality and thoughtfully designed to be repaired. Conversely, there are "handwired" amps out there that look like they were assembled by a gorilla and sound like dook.

PCB is fine if it's well-designed and easily repairable. For instance, you don't have the preamp tubes on the main circuit board. 😂

Yup even almost 20 years ago when I first started going to five guys I thought it was a bit pricey back then and it justs kept going up and up and up. But yeah PCB amps is all about the design like Jonathan said if they just slap some tube sockets on there and some components without any care whatsoever to the effects of heat on the board then those are the ones you don’t want

What do you guys think of the Fender 57 Tweed Champ reissue?

I'm fine with a well thought out- laid out high quality through hole pcb like are now in Magnatone amps. These high priced boutique amp makers have amazing tech and customer service. Worth the extra money. I draw the line on amps that state they're hardwired and the connections are made with quick connectors and cheap pcbs like those of which are found in the new Gibson Falcon amps.

All amp designs are a case-by-case basis. AC30CC2s cook themselves, AC30C2s don't, both PCB. My Carr Artemus is a brilliant P2P amp, but my P2P Carr Telstar had an unfixable reverb leak that was a symptom of the design. I understand what spurred this video; the issue is less that the new Gibsons are PCBs *and* expensive, and more that they're Mesa junk.

My mojotone pr I just put together was less than half the price of the 64 custom pr and sounds extremely close to my 79 pr.

Nice video guys..... a bit of the old "damage control" me thinks...... gotta love it

I've soldered a lot of different boards in my day, but I've yet to build a tube amp.... I would assume that at this point you'd almost have to use some sort of PCB in order to create a modern combo amp. I'm thinking of the manufacturing process and it just seems to keep costs and the size of these units down, PCBs have to be the most effective way to accomplish those goals.

the word Jonathan was looking for was "heat sink." Thermal pads and paste etc. that protect the components on the rest of the board from being overheated. These of course will falter over time which is how computers and other electronics eventually die. I would have assumed Tube amps have a harder time dealing with more heat, but perhaps the tubes themselves are sinking some of that excess heat, and why we replace tubes as often. 🤔

Great video, possibly the introduction of robots & robotic assembly lines maybe the loophole that a human hand was involved in assembly ? Hopefully not.

The levels of description: the early wiring with no boards at all was point to point, think 100 year old radios; then we get to eyelet and turret board design, still a board, but easier to manufacture, still hand wired. Then pcb’s come in, and that’s also about ease and speed of manufacture, and the design of that speeds manufacturing up again. With the pcb’s, the design is the key, as I think y’all stated.

The big 3 is back

turret board or tag strip is different then point to point. point to point means each component gets soldered directly to where it needs to go. kinda gets a lil messy, especially when you have a complicated circuit.

"Hey Cesar, because it says Gibson, they'll be enough people out there to not question that it might be garbage." "Let's make $"

Ah, they listened to one of my recent comments. Their solution is: they added a third person to the video and were through this smart move able to at least hide the liquor that used to be on display in the middle. Thanks!

I think what most of us actually care about is that an amp can be repaired. If I spend money on something, I don't want it to be trash if it develops an issue. I am kind of surprised Fender, Marshall, or Vox hasn't made a modular amp where components are PCB, but there are internal connections on standard connectors where if something dies, like a pot, you just buy a new one, unplug the old pot, take it out, put the new one in, and plug it in.

Three is a big difference between a PCB and a PWB. The PWB is what is is being referred to as a terminal board

Hand wired are usually simplistic one channel amps. I'll put a boutique circuit board amp like a soldano, friedman, bogner, or deitzel against any "hand wired" amp.

As a bar gig player, four nights a week if you spill a beer on a circuitboard, it’s pretty much toast, going to point in a lift to fight another day

A well made PCB is thick with big traces. Components on the board are easily replaced. Avoid PCB mounted tube sockets and be leery of mounted pots. @14:40 "Let's get down to brass tits" --Well done Sir. Be sure to pause and note all three faces.

Hand wire will have hard landing points for the components with stronger soldering, wire rather than thin traces, easier to repair and withstands oxidation better. The PCB built robotically are loaded and wave soldered by machine with smaller components that have gone through a solder bath, their first bout with heat. Old school is better.

Had (have?) a HRD; was a special edition, with purple tolex and a Celestian Vintage 30 speaker. Started out great, as I auditioned almost every amp at my then local GC; ran into a problem about a year in, so I took it to an “authorized Fender repair facility” for warranty work… came back as the most dull, lifeless, crappy sounding amp ever… I complained to Fender, who then told me “tone was not a warranty issue”!!!! Seriously?!? Back in the day, I had a great relationship with my local GC, and the manager there convinced Fender to send a complete new loaded PCB, which took me back to at least original sound… So warning- even on PCB amps one small change in resistor values can make a HUGE difference in tone… even if “not in the signal path” as the tech kept trying to tell me… But now the HRD chassis is a custom built, hand-wired (by me) riff on a 5F6A, because I was a sucker for the purple tolex… 😂

Bad design is bad design regardless of how it is built. There’s good PCB and bad point to point. Most people won’t get deep enough into the subject to understand the nuances.

If the new Gibson amps are “hand wired”, then so is every other tube amp on earth.

Nope I get cold shrinkage, not heat...thanks I'll be here all week. Uhmm the space shuttle, planes, tv's and vehicles have pcb's. Just play the damn thing. Yes I played an internet expert on television...and .there are many, in fact all of them.

Point to point used to be part to part I believe? No turret board or the like. Probably good for smaller amps with much less features. But turrets and Pcb are great if designed right imo. All of the variants sounds great it’s more about repairing and reliability. Blues Juniors sound great, but will cook themselves in time. Although my Pro Junior has been rocking for years and has original tubes and hasn’t cooked yet? So…?

I have a 1982 deluxe Reverb II designed by Paul Rivera. Apparently, this was the end of the era of point to point, mass produce fender amplifiers.

five guys and fries are awesome but expensive up here in Canada

So the real title of this video is PCB: Gibson Falcon Internet Rage?? 😂

I want a hand wired smartphone

Anything Casino Guitars is good, but, I've really enjoyed these threeple episodes.

Mesa boogie is considered to be the first of the boutique amps. They are also and have always been hand assembled, with a PCB board. They seem to last a long time…

I prefer the pcbs that are hand wired point to point.

"Heat-sync" Jonathan.

SUNDRAGON AMPS !!!

It would all be good if you just took the back off it and looked at how it’s made. I learned this via you tube.

65 delux reverb reissue no problem great amp but if that changes with time and use finding a good amp tech can be a problem.

Don't Forget The Hamster On The Wheel

How much for the ape?

Sorry guys, I think you're just adding to the confusion with this one. Maybe do a Part 2 with an amp tech?

This makes me glad I’m a bass player…😂

If you hand wire components to a pcb that has a bad layout, what's the difference? Almost all the Marshall amps have pcb boards going way back. If the Amp sounds good play it.

You know who likes point-to-point, hand-wired, no PCB (especially, no surface mount mini-components)? DIYers and amp repair shops! Because they are fast and easy to work on!

The problem is the Falcon is built like an AC10C1, but priced like a Friedman.

Clapton, Stevie Ray Vaughn, Jimi, Page, they could plug into a toaster and it would sound amazing. Guitar players are like golfers, too much emphasis on the equipment.

Same story with America Autos and Motorcycles. Usta could shadetree surgeon the heck out of those. Now you have to have a diploma in Chinese to work on them....or "special" tools

My Estebans always sound the same when I play them. Sort of shitty, Some days more than others.

Just like a VCR it’s toast

Wait wait wait. Where’s the Dune talk?

The most importaint thing is good quality power supply. Then having a good design with 1% tolerance resistors and caps. 5% is average. The tollerence is reason for amp soundi different with the same model.

Mine are

It's not really whether handwired, pcb, etc, it's about misrepresentation on something that is not

Like

yba - 1 from 1972. Hand wired. no pcb.

Fender has given up. They really don't care about the consumers anymore.

Are you guys calling a turret/terminal board a pcb? I have no problem with those. But my personal experiences with modern actual pcb amps has not been good! Not the sound so much, but with the reliability. Pcb boards do heat up and fail. It would be better if the tube sockets were not mounted to the boards. I have also had one (Laney) where the pcb became microphonic.

Tassels hand wired point to point???😉

Printed circuit boards are actually more reliable than handwprinted circuit board or more assistant and easy to replace handwire just means that they went as you're gonna get to point-to-point but they are terrible to take on the road you will need somebody with a sottering gun and knows how to do it right if you're gonna take a handwire on tour The printed circuit board is much better do they get hot only when certain Resistors and other such things are up against the circuit board and it's used for a long time

Also yall ‘Circuit Board does not equal Printed Circuit Board’ you can have a circuit board without a PCB.

Hand wired means America and duct tape and bless the man that made yoga pants. This has nothing to do with the amp.

bad design like tubes on circuit board- yup- like the new gibson you have to take apart to change tubes.......

We all know what's going on. Deception sucks

Fender Custom shop amps 7:38 are NOT point to point. lol gees guys multiple errors in this explainer

Respectfully I think you’re a bit misinformed as to point to point, turret board, and eyelet board. I suggest a part 2 with an expert.

How to lie whilst technically telling the truth.

No. No. No. Turret or eyelet boards are NOT point-to-point.