This review appeared in the march 2002 issue of Vintage Guitar magazine.

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Amps  By Gerald Weber

The Vintone Acey 10

Retro look, built of passion and know-how

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     Doug Stalters, Owner of Vintone Circuits, Pompano Beach, Florida, ships his amps in custom made wooden crates. If you've ever been shipped something that was maybe a bit large, heavy or bulky - and expensive - you've felt Doug's trepidations, and understand his logic in shipping his amps in dropkick-proof packaging!  Anyway, Doug's Vintone Acey 10 arrived safe and sound.

      Doug has 25 years of hands-on experience in electronics and woodworking. I met him at my tube amp seminar last November, and I could tell he was obsessed with tubes and tube amplifier design. I like that about a person!

         Today he builds amps based on his own designs (among other things). He offers a standard line and does custom one-off amps limited only by a bridled imagination (and maybe budget).

Features

     Aesthetically, the Acey 10 is decadent retro. Its solid oak cabinet reminds one of shoping at Ethan Allen - the quality is that good! The dovetail corners are flawless. And the clever chassis mounting system incorporates an internal shelf tilted 40 degrees, allowing the tubes to stand (mostly) upright. The "hipness factor" in this is that it allows the tubes to stand up instead of hanging down, yet it still has the control panel on the top front of the amp! The chassis is rectangular, but with the 40-degree angled shelf, the face panel tilts back slightly - like a brown, black, or silver face Fender. With the upright chassis design, one could also expect better cooling.

    The wraparound grille/baffleboard allows for floating baffleboard design (the top and bottom of the baffleboard float, whle the sides are attached), but with the late -50s retro/Dano look. This is unique among modern amps with a wraparound grill.

The Tubes

     The Acey 10 arrived with the tubes wrapped separately. To install them I had to remove the back panel to get my fat hands inside (but the handy tube chard makes installation a snap). Comparatively speaking, this amp uses some obscure tubes, which may be a blessing because there are plenty of NOS inventories of these tubes available at bargain prices. The rectifier is an EZ81 (the British name for a 6CA4). The triode side of an ECF82 is used for the normal channel, and the pentode side uses as an oscillator for the vibrato channel. An EF86 pentode (6267) runs the vibrato channel. The phase inverter utilized both sides of a 12AX7 in a longtailed pair configuration.

Chassis and Circuit 

     A peek inside revealed two aluminum chassis bolted together to make one, with one faceplate. The rectifier circuit was in the small chassis and everything else was in the bigger chassis. Sockets are corrosion-resistant gold-plated porcelain tube sockets - definitely military-spec quality and certainly an excellent choice for best heat dissipation. The circuit design exhibited improvements over the original Vox AC10 design. For example, there's a standby switch, a fuse, and a beefed-up power supply - all three were missing in the original. The component board is 1/8" epoxy glass laminate with brass eyelets  - an excellent example of a marriage between new and old technologies!

    All other components are top quality (Carling switches, Sprague Atom Filter caps, Orange drop coupling and tone caps, Carbon composition resistors, complete with stainless steel hardware). And Doug knows how to build things right, and he has a keen eye for detail. It also carries a Weber VST (no affiliation with Kendrick) Blue Pup 10" speaker, which works very well with the amp and cabinet. 

Tonal Assessment

    I tested the amp with both single-coil and humbucking pickups. With the humbuckers, the normal channel sounded very "brown" with tonal complexity and richness. The single master tone control simply rolled off high end. The vibrato channel was really cool, but different. It had the pentode gain stage with the vibrato oscillator modulating the pentode differently than any vibrato circuit I've seen. The vibrato effect absolutely defined shimmery. The channel had plenty of gain, but not enough to drive the output stage into Class A/B operation.

     With only 10 watts, this combo could work very well for very small club venues, especially in towns with sound ordinances. For bigger venues, it could always be mic'ed. It's suprising how much tone can be gotten out of a pair of the EL84s, when they're done right.

The Footswitch

     Any review of the Acey 10 would be incomplete if I didn't mention the footswitch, which activates the vibrato, and is absolutely awesome; it's a large piece of oak with a jeweled bezel indicator lamp operated on 3.4 volts. The wooden enclosure is stained to match the amp, when you see how much effort goes into the building of the footswitch, you can imagine what goes into the amp itself!

     Doug Stalters can be reached by e-mail ampcrazy2001@yahoo.com or check out  www.vintone.com . ____________________________________________________________________________

Gerald Weber is president and founder of Kendrick Amplifiers Inc. His books include A Desktop Reference of Hip Vintage Guitar Amps and Tube Amp Talk for the Guitarist and Tech. He has also produced two videos, Tube Amp Basics for the Guitarist, and Basic Tube Guitar Amplifier Servicing and Overhaul. Gerald fronts his own blues/rock  power trio and is a heavyweight boxer.

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