| What is New About Pritchard
Amps
Pritchard Amps present a super-new
experience in playing by providing an awesome palette
of warm, full-bodied, thick, alive tones combined
with a very practical versatility. Pritchard amplifiers
have a retro look that surrounds great, new artistic
designs in both acoustics and electronics. The
new patented and proprietary features are described
briefly below in four groups: Appearance, Tone,
Control, and Quality. Next are technical discussions
of some of these points.
APPEARANCE
Pritchard Amps have also created
a new, patented style of cabinets that give them
a unique appearance and functionality. A very retro
looking grill protects and hides the speakers.
The amplifier is positioned down the back with
the knobs on the top so that they can be seen and
adjusted easily. Pritchard products stand out.
TONE, TOUCH, & FEEL
Pritchard's 15 years of amplifier
research has brought the linguistically blurry
concepts of amplifier behavior into focus. This
process has been made much more difficult by the
lack of applicable engineering theory. Tone, touch
and feel are quickly dismissed by the engineering
community. The following features contribute to
the wonderful character of Pritchard Amps.
• Pritchard's
patents emphasize the output stage because the
great character of vintage amplifiers comes predominately
from the output stage. There are two reasons for
this: First and contrary to popular sales pitches,
the output stage supplies most of the tone because
it handles bigger signals, which are much more
subject to amplifier characteristics. Second, the
output stage is much more complicated than preamplifier
stages and present players with much more diverse
tonal embellishments.
• Pritchard
amplifiers can transition the region between clean
and dirty that many amps find difficult if not
impossible. With a Pritchard amp you can find that
there is magic in this land. Here you can trade
picking strength for harmonic character. Light
picking is clean, moderate picking is crunchy,
and heavy picking is dirty. This vintage feature
has been ignored by many artists because most amplifiers
manufactured today simply sound horrible in this
region. Pritchard amplifiers can expand your artistic
horizons.
• Pritchard
amps are quite fat both in harmonic character and
in some voices. The harmonic character is created
in the output stage by patented circuitry.
• Pritchard
amps exaggerate power supply sag to produce much
higher attack powers and a "cleaner" distortion.
The high attack powers gives Pritchard amps added
power to cut through.
• Pritchard
found that some aspects of modern amplifiers are
not desirable. Pritchard amps uses the vintage
concept of a hardworking preamplifier stage to
drive the output stage. In contrast the standard
phase splitter is so hi-fi that it adds nothing
to the musical experience.
• The
Pritchard amplifier preamp stages uniquely exceed
the musical nature of the Grid-Plate Action of
the very popular 12AX7. The 12AX7 was successfully
engineered to engineering concepts of amplification
- high gain and as linear as possible. In contrast,
the Grid-Plate Action of the Pritchard preamplifiers
has been designed for the artistic sensibilities
of musicians. It adds expression and character
to both clean and dirty sounds. Pritchard amplifiers
have a high GPA.
• Part
of the GPA phenomena is grid conduction. This is
important in over driven amplifiers because grid
current via bias shifts changes the harmonic structure
and that makes the amp sound differently as the
note dies out.
• The
Pritchard amplifier preamp is mated to the guitar
to optimize the guitar character.
• Pritchard
amps amplifies this picking character by making
the amp more responsive to heavy picking than to
light picking. When you really want to make a point,
Pritchard amps help you.
• Pritchard
amps also have all of the sag characteristics,
both in power and gain. When a note is picked the
attack comes through at a higher gain and higher
power than the middle and the end of the note.
• The
original Pritchard amplifiers used the vintage
design philosophy exclusively, however, more recent
additions, the Blood Dagger and the Gold Estoc,
incorporate more modern boutique flavors of voicing.
Additionally, the Gold Estoc has a post-distortion
volume control to work with the Watts Knob ™ to
lower the distroted volume below the clean level
or to mix preamplifier and output stage distortion. |
