Advice needed Rose Morris AC30

danban

Hi Guys, I've got an opportunity to buy a Rose Morris Vox AC30.

What are they like in comparison to the C2 version I currently own?

danban

It's the Point to point wiring one with the Vox blue speakers.

bingefeller

Ask @Voxman  he should be able to help.  

Voxman

bingefeller said:

Ask @Voxman  he should be able to help.  

LOL!     They'll sound different obviously - a point to point version will give you a purer signal chain.  But as to which tones you'd prefer, this is very much down to your ears.  The speakers make a massive difference in tone & volume so if you're comparing an AC30 with blues to one with eg greenbacks, you've got a huge difference before you start.  

Whereas later Vox AC30 versions such as the AC30CC2 and the current AC30C2 are designed with modern features, would I be right in assuming the Rose Morris AC30 is a top-boost model with 6 inputs but no master volume (some versions had a tube driven accutronics reverb)?  And particularly with point to point AC30's I think you'd even struggle to find two that sound exactly the same, even from the same production year.   

There's more info on the Rose Morris versions (1979-1985) here:

http://www.voxshowroom.com/uk/amp/rmac30tbr_1979_hood.html

ICBM

I could be wrong, but I'm not aware of any point-to-point wired Rose Morris AC30. Even using the usual guitarist's definition of point-to-point .

If you mean a Rose-Morris reissue 'Vintage' AC30, it's PCB. Nicely made, pretty reliable, and the circuit is fairly accurate to (and sounds like) a vintage AC30, although it doesn't have a valve rectifier. (Which is also like the C2.)

No master volume, no reverb, no FX loop, but it does have the - important in my opinion - classic Vib/Trem channel, which is far superior to the plain tremolo on the modern models.

danban

It's the one with the valve reverb and the Vox blues in 

danban

It looks like a handwired on two vanilla looking pcb boards

Voxman

I must admit, I get a bit confused as to what is point to point, handwired and hybrid PCB.  I had honestly thought the pics of the Rose Morris amp in the link I posted were point to point - it certainly doesn't look like a printed circuit board to me.  But I'm not an amp tech so I bow to @ICBM's superior knowledge here as to what all these terms really mean and some pic examples of different types would be very helpfu to improve my understanding too.  

ICBM

No, that's definitely PCB. Although oddly, the reverb board is hand wired!

That should illustrate the difference too.

Voxman

Now  I really am confused @ICBM ;. I thought pcb's were the green things you got in things like your sky remote control, computers and modelling amps/MFX units??:

ICBM

Well, that's pretty much what those tan-coloured boards are - although they're only single-sided, so the printed circuit stuff is all on the other side where you can't see it.

Now, if you really want to make it complicated…

The amp is a PCB amp - that's indisputable, it contains PCBs. But it is *also* hand-wired to a considerable degree - all the connections off the PCBs are done by hand. It's also reasonably likely that given the age of the amps, the PCBs were hand-fitted with the components, rather than it being done by a robot. So you could legitimately argue that it's a hand-assembled PCB amp - but it is not, by the usual definitions guitarists use, a hand-wired amp - that would require that it doesn't use PCBs.

Does it matter? Your guess is as good as mine! Personally I think it doesn't if many of the usual problems with PCB construction have been avoided - which they have. The most important thing to avoid is fitting components which get hot onto the PCB, and also anything heavy enough to vibrate and crack its solder joints. It is useful to identify various different series of amps though…

It's very important to know why this is different from the Birch-Stolec era Voxes, which are one of the reasons why PCB has such a bad name - these are terrible, shoddy amps with just about every design error possible in them - *and* they use a PCB, of extremely low quality and with all the wrong types of parts mounted on them.

It's also important to note that no AC30 is "point to point" - that means no circuit board of any kind, with the small components connected directly between the chassis-mounted ones. Almost all hand-wired amps are made with either tag boards (like Vox), turret boards (like Marshall) or eyelet boards (like Fender), or occasionally tag or turret strips (like Hiwatt).