Don’t squash my hopes and dreams man! Maybe one day I will find my lil featherweight Twin Reverb!
The last thing I want to be is a hopes/dreams squasher! I’ve always been a hopes/dreams enabler, which is one of many reasons why my two daughters and my son are the most interesting people I know, and have had the will to do exactly what they’ve hoped to do in life.
My own thinking is that the thing to try in reducing weight (but still getting a classic sound) doesn’t necessarily require messing with the electronics
By focusing on the electronics to reduce weight, I think the amp makers are barking up the wrong tree (pun intended as will be explained below). The old electronics technology sounds great, and isn’t the worst problem for weight. A transformer for a Twin in its packing is under 9 pounds. That ain’t the boat anchor here.
Seems to me that materials technology might be put to good use to replace the heavy wooden cabinet everything sits in. As an example, even a so-called light weight pine 212 speaker cabinet weighs 28 pounds -
unloaded.
In a 65-70 pound amp like a Twin, that’s 43% of the weight!!
The wood is, quite simply, the worst problem to be solved if you want a light weight amp. Not the electronics.
Lighter weight speakers help; a Fender Twin Neo in its bog-standard plywood wooden cabinet will come in at 56 pounds, compared with a standard Twin that weighs 64 pounds.
But with that amp, the only difference is the weight of the speakers. What if you could reduce the weight of the wooden box the other parts sit inside, and cut that 28 pounds (for a
pine cabinet — the current Twins are even heavier plywood, but let’s go best case scenario) in half, or less? Your full-sized Twin would now weigh 42 pounds, about what your Princeton weighs.
Make it a 112, and you’ve got a 37 pound amp, even with traditional electronics, and that doesn’t factor in lighter cabinets due to smaller size.
Are we getting into manageable territory here?
You might be able to do that, or even more, relatively inexpensively, if you use wood-based nanocellulose material. Maybe it’d even sound like a heavier wooden cab. It’s stronger than Kevlar, 8 times stronger than stainless steel, and has zillions of applications. It’s also biodegradable, unlike most plastic.
It’s actually lighter and potentially stronger than carbon fiber. I read somewhere that a plant in Madison WI is being, or has been built, to make use of this technology. Whether it will sound like a traditional wooden cabinet is quite another question, but no one’s experimented with it that I’m aware of.
Or you could go carbon fiber with, say, a wooden baffle, for example, and reduce that weight. Carbon fiber is lighter than aluminum and many other lightweight materials.
Maybe there are other good materials choices? Who’s even experimented with this concept?
