Welcome back to the blog, everybody ! We haven’t published a new blog for about 6 weeks, but things have been rather busy at the Richards Amplifier Company – Australia. Well, it was quite a surprise when we were recently contacted by our very good customer Victor, to say that he had acquired a Vedette EL34 amplifier, built back in the 1960’s in Sydney by ZJM Industries.
This is the first ever Vedette amplifier that we have encountered, and only the third amp by ZJM, so not many appear to have survived. For a more detailed discussion of ZJM Industries, please check our blog dated June 26th 2012, titled the Challenge guitar amplifier.
The Vedette is loosely based on the Fender “Blackface” amp designs, pre-reverb, but with EL34/6CA7 output valves and those big Aussie transformers that we noted with the Challenge amp. The sweep of the controls on the Vedette is a bit different, and the midrange is a bit bigger. The standout feature is probably the valve-driven tremolo, which gives the amp a lot of character.
While the EL34 & GZ34 valves had been replaced at a previous service, many important service issues had been completely overlooked. The photo to the right shows we replaced a couple of power supply caps that were well past their use-by date. The speaker jack & #1 input jack on the tremolo channel also required replacement. The tremolo didn’t work at all, which required a new 12AX7 plus a cathode bypass capacitor. The prescence control was no longer functional, as a result of someone’s experiment, and required rewiring.
But the most significant outstanding problem was that this amp was electrically unsafe to use ! We installed all new 240V 3-core cable & 3-pin plug, plus a fuse in series with the active (brown) lead, installed on the chassis rear panel, and also a dedicated chassis earth connection (not a shared connection). Now the amp is safe to use.
The wiring in the Vedette is pretty rough in places, and the sweep of the tremolo and eq pots is a bit frustrating for the user, with most of the action compressed into a few degrees of rotation. But, actually the amp works fine and also background noise is quite low, in spite of the random routing of wiring, which pretty much breaks all the rules for audio electronics.
Once again, we appeal to anyone out there who has some knowledge of the ZJM guitar and amp building enterprise in Sydney back in the 1960’s, to make contact and perhaps we could publish a more complete history. We will be back soon with a new blog publishing some photo’s of Victor’s new Richards Blue Mood series 12W 6V6 amp.
ivanrichards 