The hunt

I'd been lurking about on 18watt.com, seeking comfort in knowing that I wasn't the only poor guy out there spending way too much time thinking about capacitors and layouts and transformers and stuff that would get me a sideways glance and a little shake of the head when my wife walked past. Here was a community filled with thousands of geeks looking for that sound, and getting that same look from their spouses.

The amount of info on the 18 watt site was way cool, and after a lot of poking around, a few posts, a couple of phone calls to other builders, I finally decided on a TMB (treble middle bass) variant (Thanks Bruce at Mission Amps for the suggestion). But which one?

This simple question took the longest to answer, as I needed good clean tone, lots of headroom, not too loud, but loud enough, and it all needed to fit in the cabinet I'd salvaged from the trash - a butt ugly Ringo brand cheapo 10" bass cab. And it had to be cheap.

After some head scratching (and yes, some ass scratching as well), I decided on the Trinity Amps sIII model, which had the TMB controls and circuit on one channel and the original 1958 Marshall circuit on the other. I figured it could be tweaked to either sound like a mini-Plexi or a Bluesbreaker. How could I go wrong?

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