“This strikes us as an unreal studio amp, or something that would be amazing for around home sitting right in front of it and pouring your heart out to after midnight. What a perfect little amp that can do it all. Hot damn…” Tone Quest Report July 2023 Review of the “Vibe” Amplifier
The JCA Circuits “Vibe” Amplifier is the newest creation from my studio. I began offering the design in 2021 with the run being limited to only a few amplifiers.
Vibe is based on my beloved late 1970’s Silverface Fender Vibro Champ AA764 which was given to me by a friend in the early 90’s. That particular Fender amplifier was among the first platforms I used to delve into the fine details of music electronics modification & design. Throughout the decades, that humble amp has offered me countless opportunities to explore the incredible potential of single ended amplifiers. It has been heavily modified and re-built into various circuits & iterations over the decades. In the 2000’s, I came up with several design concepts relating to modified grounding schemes, power supply/filtering, voicing & frequency response, and touch sensitivity concepts which differ significantly from an original. These concepts have been included and expanded upon in the Vibe. It is designed to pay homage to & improve upon the incredible potential of my very favorite low power, single ended, class A1 guitar amplifiers.
The musical potential of the Vibe far exceeds its physical dimensions. Vibe is designed to excel either on its own OR as part of a stereo/wet-dry/dual mono rig. It is a classic sounding amplifier which behaves as a very deep, clear, and warm resonant window that highlights guitar FX & pedalboards. Compared to other single ended guitar amplifier designs, the Vibe has an abundance of clean useable headroom, clarity, note separation, and touch sensitivity. It also displays a very low noise floor where the signal emerges from an inky black soundstage.
It is highly useable for critical recording in a studio environment where it will not damage fragile microphones or cause excessive noise. Vibe’s design was heavily inspired by one of my musical heroes who talks about “leaning back into a wall of sound”. I designed Vibe to offer the player a richer, more complex spread of cleaner, clearer harmonics and super responsive experience of a guitar amplifier working hard-just scaled down to more useable levels.
FEATURES
• Class A1 single ended 6V6/6L6 output stage
• Jupiter 8CS Speaker
• Eurotubes vacuum tube dampers
• Upgraded power & output transformers
• Extra power filtering stages which behave as a “Tank” circuit
• Modified star grounding scheme
• Isolated input & output jacks
• 2 Watt Ohmite carbon film & metal film signal resistors
• Mallory 150 & silver mica signal capacitors
• Silver plated oxygen free copper/Teflon jacketed signal wire
• Stainless steel hardware
• All parts sourced within North America, Japan, and Europe
