Bit of Wednesday fun - guess the amp?

DJH83004

Latest batch of amps in for repair / service - can anyone guess the Selmer?

revsorg

It looks suspiciously like the one half way down this page.  Is it a kind of Leslie?

"Former Selmer employee Patrick Kirby also reported a Selmer amp with built-in reverb and Leslie, which he says was rented by Abbey Road studios for Beatles sessions. (I consider the Beatles connection apocryphal until a photo turns up, since an actual Vibratone was shown prominently in "Let It Be".) Gaz Hunter (UK) has kindly provided a photo of this unusual combo amp, which he compares to a Fender Bassman tonally. No longer made. "

Edit: a 1968 Selmer-Leslie combined amplifier & loudspeaker
Second edit: 

DJH83004

Spot on Revsorg! it is a Treble N' bass 50 reverb (in itself quite a rare beast) built in to a Leslie cab. if you look closely at the image, just above the control unit, you can see the drive pulley and belt. This one needed some minor carpentry work on the castor mounts and reverb sorting. The amp is also quite early as it uses a 6BR8 pentode / triode for the reverb drive and recovery, they later switched to an ECC83. Nice job but weighs a tonne!! 

revsorg

The big question - what does it sound like???

DJH83004

To be honest it is classic Leslie tremolo / doppler effect (fixed speed), but more natural than say a pedal or classic electronic trem circuit. I wouldn't say you could ever gig with it, but suspect it would find a place in a high end studio, where users want to experiment with different sounds - interesting bit of kit :-) 

Bygone_Tones

Must be quite a rare one that. Cant say I've seen one of those before.

ICBM

From an age before electronic signal processing, when time-shifting effects were done by physically moving the source!

I've never seen one either. It's funny how it looks pretty neatly done on the outside, but quite a Heath Robinson lash-up inside…

What's that grey and black canister-like thing on the bottom? Some sort of transformer/pad from the normal speaker to the Leslie amp?

DJH83004

Spot on IC, I think it is a moulded case transformer or pad inductor (judging by the weight), one speaker feeds directly into the control unit and the other directly in / out ( a phasing effect??). Unfortunately the customer collected it this afternoon and the only issue was a small bit of carpentry on the castor mounts and the reverb was non-functioning, the Leslie side of things worked fine - so didn't dig too deep. No schematics as you would expect. 

ICBM

I assume it's exactly the same as the standard Selmer reverb model 50-watter (which is slightly disturbing if it's only actually driving one of those fragile Goodmans!) with a separate Leslie amp (does that say Leslie 16 on the label?) lashed up to it...

DJH83004

Yes it is a Leslie 16, if you look on the web there is quite a bit of info on them, the moulded case device is actually a cross over network and obviously as the speaker is fixed they achieve the effect by rotating a vane in front.