Anyone Tried A 5E3 With Fancy OT Iron?

[rp]

So what did you hear? Good, bad, meh?

I have a Hammond Hifi 8K/15W unit: P-T1650E and 150ma 330V OT so I can throw together a 5E3 for next to nothing for a friend's kid. An amp to make a man out of him. I just don't want to wind up with a bright, sterile, unpleasant 5E3. Everything else will be cc and Mallory 150s. At the worse I can retro fit a MC 5E3 OT for $30 but I'd like to use up the Hammond.

[212Mavguy]

I have a silverface Champ tht I ripped the guts out of and rebuit with new, higher caacity Allen PT, BF turret board with fancy hifi parts, and hugely massive Heyboer 30w 5000 primary/4/8/16 secondary. It sounds wonderful.

Just do it. Bet you like it...lots.

[FunkyE9th]

I've experimented with a couple 8K HiFi OT's with a 5E3/Princeton inspired amp. I ended up using a regular 5E3 OT. The HiFi OT's were harsh sounding to my ears. The bass was nice an tight though. Maybe if you use a TMB rather than a regular 5E3 style volume and tone controls you can shape the sound better.

[burkeee]

I've built a couple amps with hi-fi OTs, but I push more watts through them than they're rated for. One is a 8W amp with 3W iron and the other is 18W with 8W iron. I think the limited bandwidth of guitar isn't near the chore of amplifying full bandwidth hi-fi, so to get them working at bit and out of the sterile sounding zone takes a bit more omph.

[guitarmike2107]

The hifi amp has extended bass and high end, so your bass will be tighter and you may get more sparkle turning into fizz with increasing distortion.

It also won’t saturate easily, which is good or bad depending on what you want.

You can always tame any high fizz with conjunctive filtering or similar methods, but it will never sound the same as a cheap undersized OT pushed over the edge of it limits.
You need to decide what sounds best to you.

I would build it with the HiFI OT and see what you get, it will be punchy!

[tubeswell]

I did a 5E3 with a largish OT (25W?) and PT (180mA) and it sounded quite jazzy, but also had okay break-up when dimed. FWIW

Here is a couple of soundbytes of the jazzy side of it and then with a little more oomph (with a little help from a 6G15 and a 5G9 accompaniment). Of course it aint gonna be the same as a 'proper' 5E3, and your one will probably sound different to mine anyhow.

[rp]

Here is a couple of soundbytes of the jazzy side of it and then with a little more oomph (with a little help from a 6G15 and a 5G9 accompaniment). Of course it aint gonna be the same as a 'proper' 5E3, and your one will probably sound different to mine anyhow.

Tubeswell, nice clips, hell, now I gotta build me a 5G9. I've read some of your old posts while researching the 5G9 over the 5F11, it's high on my list of future builds as is a reverb unit.

That is notably jazzy, it's what i figured a bigger OT would do in a 5E3. I doubt the friend's kid is the jazzy type but I'm not sure and should ask, I might be mistakenly assuming he's a shredder. The 5E3's a unique amp, more than just a sum of parts, very holistic and organic and I've been unhappy with all but the most minor tweeks I've tried, including part subs like metal films and fancy caps. I found you can improve a quality here or there but it always damaged the whole. Which is why I posted about the OT upgrading.

I hate my chassis looking like overworked projects especially if I'm giving it to someone so i wanted to avoid drilling holes for 2 different OTs, but I just rechecked the Hammond and weighed it and checked the specs and I now think it's the 10W P-T1608, so maybe it will saturate a bit, still it's twice the size and 3x the weight of the original. Lets see what happens.

[Alexo]

Everyone disses hifi OT's, but in practice, I think they can be amazing. The cleans can be out of this world, and if the od sound is too harsh (which I don't find) it's really just a matter of choosing the right speaker, imo.