The history of high gain amplifiers for guitar.
Basically goes like this:
Fender makes the Fender Bassman in 1954. People go crazy over it for its power, loudness, and rich, full tone. Many people also started hot-rodding them, as people do, to make them sound better.
Across the pond, Jim Marshall, founder of Marshall Amplification, starts copying the circuit diagram of the Fender Bassman, but he adds his own tweaks based on availability of parts, taste, and what made sense for the amplifier to work. All this to fill a need, because shipping American equipment over to Britain was unfeasible at the time. This is the origin of the Marshall Bluesbreaker, made somewhere between 1964 and 1965. People lose their mind over this, as it's a distinctly British version of a Fender Bassman.
This eventually evolves into Jim Marshall in 1965 making the Marshall Super Leads or Plexis so-named because of their plexi-glass front panels.
These eventually evolve into the Marshall JCM800 in 1981, widely considered to be one of the best high gain amplifiers ever made that has appeared on thousands of hard rock and metal records.
In San Francisco, CA, Randall Smith, founder of Mesa/Boogie Amplifiers, also starts tinkering around with Fender Bassmans, eventually leading into the Mark I. The amp originally started as a practical joke, as Randall Smith essentially borrowed a Fender Princeton from his friend Country Joe, and hot-rodded it by placing the Fender Bassman's power amp section in it along with a 1x12 speaker. The resulting amplifier proved to be loud and successful, and Smith made more than 200 of these Princeton "Boogies"-a name allegedly provided by Carlos Santana by saying the amps "really boogie."
These eventually evolved into Mesa/Boogie's most sought after amplifier, the Mark IIC+ in 1984 and 1985. The Mark IIC+ was originally a modification of their earlier Mark II which was released in 1978.
Mesa/Boogie is known for creating the first true high gain amplifiers by adding in multiple cascading preamp sections, which allows the tubes to stack up enough distortion required by players.
The Mesa Mark II and the Marshall Bluesbreaker, as well as other Fender Bassman hot rods were the inspiration for another California based amp tech, Mike Soldano, to make the Soldano SLO100 in 1986.
This was an amp that caught the eye of Eddie Van Halen, who played it for a while, until he signed his deal with Peavey. Peavey then took the Soldano SLO100 as inspiration behind the famous Peavey 5150, released in 1991, which is basically a Peavey modified Soldano SLO100, which is part of the reason why it sounds so aggressive, and why the 5150 still appears on countless records. EVH eventually left Peavey to start his own brand, taking the 5150 name with him, so the previous 5150's were then rebranded as 6505 and 6505+. Same circuit, just a name change.
The massive popularity of the Soldano SLO100 is what inspired Mesa/Boogie to make their own version of it, the much loved and sought after Mesa/Boogie Dual Rectifier, in 1992. The Dual Rectifier is so named because it has two rectifiers in it, a tube based rectifier, or a solid state based rectifier, and it allows users to switch between the two.
I don't know who would find this interesting, but I did.
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