NAD - PCL - Vintage Amp - VA1956 top

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ohm-men
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NAD - PCL - Vintage Amp - VA1956 top

Post by ohm-men » Mon May 03, 2021 12:19 am

A while ago I got this in a trade for a guitar that I got in another trade and didn't really like.
So I put the guitar up for sale and got messaged by someone who wanted to trade an "old tube amp" for this guitar.
The guy didn't knew much about the amp and neither did I.

But this is what I got;
front;
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back;
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A 1985 "PCL - Vintage Amp - model VA1956"
The thing looked like it went thru war but sounded good, so I made the trade.
Still I didn't know anything about this amp, aside being 50 Watts on a pair of 6L6 and a Fender-ish sound.

Turns out PCL was a German brand of Tube Amplifiers that kind of got on the Vintage Amp wagon in the late 70's, early 80's by creating amps that leaned heavely on old 50's and 60's Tube amps, hence the name "Vintage Amp" I guess.
At one time they made a tweed version of their VA1956 model and had no other then Rory Gallagher playing it, most likely to get some attention on the brand. It seams the brand was revived a few years ago (after the original owner bought the company back) and they now are in the buisines of making high end guitar tube amplifiers and cabs, I think still somewhat based on this one and seam to have a good rep.

Apperently the VA1956 was availble as a head only and as a 1x12" combo.
And the tweed version with 2x12" (although I'm not sure they made a lot of these)
The amps are a bit scarse and show up from time to time on the used market place (mostly germany) prices seam to vary between € 300,- to € 500,- depending on the state of the amps... Not sure if these have a wide fan base...

The schematic of this thing is a bit weird, 2 channel amp, one clean (very Fender alike) and a dirt channel that seams to be based on a Mesa Boogie Mk.II (And more recently this schematic/or one in the same "verve" was also used by the German amp kit company "Madamp" for their A15Mk2 but then on 6V6 to create a 18 Watt version of this.)
The schematic also refers to a spring reverb tank that mine has not...
To make long storry short, the amp turned out to be a bit of a lemon when my friend (a pretty good amp tech opened it up)

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the guts, no PTP, but a board... turned out half of the amp wasn't even working. The Mesa drive channel is shot, reverb was missing (could of guessed)n and there was a whole lot of things wrong with this amp.... But still it sounded quiet good... but with a lot of his and noise, volume dropping and sometimes cutting out completly....

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Lots of tubes, most of them for the drive channel... and everthing was marked and refered to the schematic we found online.
The transformers are huge... I guess the output one makes up for the sound of this thing...

Well my friend said that the drive channel could be brought back to life, but at a cost... so I was bummed...
But he also said, we can resque the clean channel. So he did his magik and replaced some parts, bridged some corroded paths on the board by soldering wires over them and brought the thing back to life! As I didn't want to sink money in this thing, I opted to get the clean channel propperly working, tunred out to be a good choiche...

And WOW.... this thing is HUGE.... like a old BF AA863 Bassman... The low end is massive and loud... It also loves pedals (Yup, I used to own an all original BF AA863 Bassman that I stupedly sold long ago.... :fp: :wtf: ) So, I'm pretty happy with this thing...
It has a lot of switch options as well (as per original schematic). the first one (again accourding to my amp tech friend) makes you switch between "Brown" and "Blackface" (as intended by the PCL designer) then there is a boost funtion that gives the amp a DB boost, but does not push it. And the last two switches are like "Bright" switches found on BF fenders, but 2 apperently.... no idea what they were thinking there... makes the amp super bright...

I came to the conclusion that this amp was most likely a 1x12" combo that someone "beheaded" to make it a top. Hence the weird looking baffle..
(someone put a "sandbag" on it and painted it silver....)

So I decided to restore it as the originals had a light sand colored baffle board. I found some material that looked about the same for little money and went with that. Since I had a pair of old H/H 12" speakers from the mid 90's, I decided to make a small 2x12" cab for this amp (open back) and used an old Ikea roll curtain as a tolex alternative. Cheap and effective.
Even though this amp has a 4,8,16 Ohm output stage, it doesn't do so well on 4 Ohm... So I wired my 2 16Ohm speakers to get the desired 8 Ohm.
For some reason the amp sounds much better, more balanced with the 8 Ohm load connected to the 8 Ohm output stage....
Then a 4 Ohm load on the 4 Ohm output stage... No idea why...

End result;

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