Hiwatt appreciation thread - to help control my urges

[mrfreddieboy]

First post.
Been lurking for some time, and the Amp Garage is one of the few places that has a dedicated Hiwatt subforum (albeit shared with Vox but I don't hold that against anyone).
I've recently become very enamored with the Hylight-era Hiwatts and the early Biacrown-amps of Harry Joyce. I recently played through a DR504 cranked up pretty loud with a Les Paul and I fell in love with the incredible push from this amplifier.

Some people from other forums had me rediscover early Who, Live at Leeds, Isle of Wight...now I want to trade/sell my current amp to get a Hiwatt or Hiwatt-clone.

So, I thought I'd start (re-start ?) a thread to show off your Hiwatt and Hiwatt-clone rigs. Hi-Tone, Reeves, Royal, early Sound City amps are very welcome. I just need to see these beauties. Sound clips also welcome.

Fred

[sonicmojo]

Well here is my weird DR103. I've never been able to sort out what the deal is with this one as the layout is a bit off. These pics were before I replaced the orange drops with mustards but the amp sounds great and I never tried to really figure out all the differences. I didn't pay that much for it as it has some "off" things such as the extended standoffs around the power tubes, non-original transformer, and missing serial plate....so your guess is as good as mine how this one came to be as I've never been able to find another that looks like it. I've posted at other forums too and it is a mystery specimen.

[mrfreddieboy]

Still beautiful. Thanks.
I'm curious about the Groove Tubes since the Hiwatt I played had them as well. Is it that it makes re-biasing less necessary assuming you get a matched quad of the same "number"?
If not, how much of a pain is it to rebias a Hiwatt - since most if not all don't come with a bias pot.

[pompeiisneaks]

Often when a bias is set with no pot to adjust it, they set it at a negative bias that's fairly cool even for more extreme tubes. That being said, it would be pretty simple to mod it so that you replace one of the resistors in the bias circuit with a pot and a resistor in line (so you can't ever get 'too' hot if the pot fails open).

Either way it's just a variable resistor idea to raise/lower the negative bias voltage.

~Phil

[ER]

Back in the old days I played Hiwatts, everything from a custom 50 (my first one) to in the 80's a lead 100 (my last one). I always preferred them to Marshalls at the time. When I built my 100 watt D-style amp I did it in the blues master style but made the clean 70s style and the OD channel more like a Hiwatt than a Marshall. When you bypass the first tone stack it really does have those Hiwatt qualities. I don't know where you would play a Hiwatt these days, and I don't know how you could get a smaller amp to sound like one, they are a one of a kind amp. Probably one of the best amps ever to play with pedals.

[mrfreddieboy]

You can play Hiwatts in sound-proof rooms...
Seriously though, with some sort of attenuation the Hiwatts are extremely versatile.
I can see why you preferred them to Marshalls. Now I happen to like the Marshall sound (plexi and metal panels) but don't like that the more modern marshall sound like Silver Jubilee...but that's just me.

[ER]

You don't need to crank a Hiwatt to get it to sound good (but it helps) and they're less picky about what you put in front of them (pedals, single coils, cables). The old Marshalls you need to goose a bit to get them warmed up, all those marshall mods were attempts to try and overcome these things. I'm coming around to the Marshall sound lately too, but mostly sticking with old style fenders in the 40 watt range. I would love to have a 50 watt Hiwatt half stack like my first one again, and a handful of David Gilmouresque pedals. Alex Lifeson and Tommy Bolin were other notable Hiwatt users in the 70s and got great sounds out of them.

One way of kind of approximating the Hiwatt vibe is to play two amps and keep one of them dry and clean (wet/dry), with the right amps that can give you some of the body and presence Hiwatts are known for at a good volume.

One of my favorite ways to run a Hiwatt back in the old days was to use a digital delay with a dry out, send the dry out to a Boss CE-1 running stereo into Left and Right Combo amps and then the delay to the Hiwatt half stack in the middle (wet/dry/wet). A real light and slow always on chorus and a bit of reverb on the combos, and then dial in a super short delay with no repeats and adjust the delay time until all three amps snapped into a giant 3-D wall of sound. The combos would switch channels and handle all the dirt together and the Hiwatt just did it's thing solidly glueing it all together.

[mrfreddieboy]

Nice examples of unmolested Hylight era Hiwatts are becoming very hard to find, but there are some killer clone-makers out there, in particular, Hi-tone and Reeves, that make a DR504 in different flavors that just nail the Hiwatt vibe.

Do you have some old pictures of your Hiwatt gear you can share here? This is vanity time.

[ER]

Unfortunately we didn't have phones that took picture back then, no pictures of my old junk. These are what made me want Hiwatts though. I had a Rush poster where Alex had a bunch of Hiwatts on my wall as a kid. Ans if you want to hear some killer Hiwatt tones and playing listen to Tommy Bolin on Billy Cobham's Stratus album.

[mrfreddieboy]

Thank you!
You know I never really listened to Tommy Bolin, but Alex Lifeson was one of my childhood heros, too. It started with the Hemispheres album (love La Villa Strangiato).
Alex was pretty much getting his distortion through pedals though I think. Alex also exposed me to Hiwatts in the late 70s but I was too young to afford them;
I should say they were also very hard to find growing up in Connecticut - they weren't what i called a high production outfit. They didn't come up used often either.

Lately I am listening to those old live Who recordings that I never listened to much when I was young. I'm not necessarily a P-90 fan but I ran my humbucker LP through a
DR504 with master at 3/4 and normal vol past halfway somewhere (f-in loud!) and it sounded like a "thick" Live at Leeds.

It's okay every once and a while to open up the amps and I am fortunate to have adjacent neighbors who travel to India for months at a stretch.

[Blindog]

Unfortunately we didn't have phones that took picture back then, no pictures of my old junk.

Here's one of them. Remember this I bought from you to rebuild?

[ER]

Hey Blindog!

Glad to see you're still around. I remember that amp, that was my last Hiwatt I got, glad you got it up and running! I gotta say I kind of miss that one, not as much as I miss my first custom 50, but still that lead 100 was a good all-rounder.

That was the amp that finally made me take the leap to learn how to build and repair my own amps. I took it to a tech and he said he couldn't fix it because the board was too damaged. I put it in storage for a while and when I finally got back to it discovered he had taken the quad of Mullards I had in there.

[passfan]

My recovered “California” Hiwatt lead 30 combo with reverb. Eventually I will replace the pc with a turret strip but for now I’ll enjoy it for a bit. Has a Naylor special design 50 watt driver in it with vintage Phillips preamp tunes and amperex output tubes.

[mrfreddieboy]

Passfan, now that’s a Hiwatt I don’t see often. I would love to hear what that sounds like.
Do you have clips, audio, video? Cranked?

Thanks for posting your beautiful combo!

[passfan]

No recordings yet. My wife let me get it off eBay. Imagine slightly more gain than a 50 watt Marshall while being able to cut it
back and increase the master.......plus reverb. I love it. The green w/gold piping and cane grill was through mutual agreement with her. She insists all my stuff be in our living room. Next to that is a 2x12 Tweedle Dee , and a custom built firebird clone.