George Alessandro

20 years ago I built what is one of the finest guitar amps ever built. No quality components were spared at the time. I always built high-end, but for those who wanted the next level, we offered upgrade options. This amp not only has the Black Gate capacitors, Riken Ohm audio grade resistors and Audio Quest Functionally Perfect Solid Silver wire, but the client opted for the solid silver chassis upgrade. The chassis acts as the ground plane in these amps, so going from the silver plated solid copper to solid silver, is a functional upgrade. There is 4 pounds of silver needed for this chassis because of the density of silver. This was a reasonable upgrade at the time for $2000, but since silver has gone up 10x, today that would be $20,000+ to do. That is the true definition of “cost of diminishing returns”.
This amp went 20 years without service or tube replacement. It was definitely in need of power tubes but the vintage 5691 preamp tubes were still operating perfectly. We did opt to upgrade the tired coupling capacitors to what I did not have available then, solid silver foil caps. This took the amp to the next level of dynamics and transparency.
It was good to see this beauty again, but off to is owner it goes.