It's here

Yesterday afternoon Hi Mu Amps arrived in Berkeley, California after traveling cross country from Cranston, Rhode Island.
I hope to have the first new Hi Mu amps available by November in both 7 watt and 12 watt versions.
By the by, the 7 watt Hi Mu is equivalent to a Fender Tweed Deluxe in terms of volume. Of course, I think the Hi Mu has better tone, running from sweet clean to great grit based on both volume and attack.

Oh my god!

Two weeks ago I met Barry and his delightful wife Joan in person for the first time. For some time we'd been communicating by email and phone, but this was our first in-person, face-to-face meeting.

In addition to drinking much wine, a fair amount of beer, some whiskey. and eating great food, all in either Cranston or Providence, we managed to talk politics (Barry and I share similar views on the state of our great nation), music, pottery (Barry used to run a very successful pottery studio) and art.

We also talked about the future of the great amps Barry designed and built: Hi-Mu amps.

At this point in his life, Barry and his wife are seriously looking at relocating, far from the lovely home they've restored overlooking Narragansett Bay in Cranston ...



...and running an amp company isn't in the stars.

Similarly, after many years in journalism, I've decided there's no future in telling the news, it's all turned to lies and propaganda.

So we cut a deal and I purchased all the rights, designs, jigs, parts, and good will of the Hi-Mu Amplifier company. I also bought two of Barry's personal one-of-a-kind amps, both prototypes. The first is a single-ended 12 watt, 6L6-based combo amp with reverb. The second is a 30 watt push-pull monster head, with a 15 inch Golden Voice Jensen cabinet.

I also acquired parts enough to build 10 to 20 more Hi-Mu amps (7 & 12 watt versions) and the specs and plans to put Hi-Mu back in the amp building business.

Right now I'm waiting anxiously for a truck to arrive at my door with all these new goodies inside.

(It was supposed to arrive last Wednesday but ...

... Door-to-Door doesn't seem to entirely reliable).

Keep watch and I'll post the details as they occur.

The Owners Manual

Rebuilding the better beast's insides

I'm happy to say that I think I've figured out how to get my prototype to the check it and see if it makes any noise stage. (I knowingly although perhaps foolishly bought the proto in dissembled condition.) As a complete newbie tech-boi, I've traced the wiring down and think I know where the disconnected wires should be reattached. Two wriggling red wires flopping around inside the chassis connect to the power transformer, and I see a couple of 500 ohm resistors that need wires attached. The third red wire appears to connect to the output transformer and it appears the amp has no speaker output. I picked up a speaker jack and this weekend I'll pull out the solder gun and try not to damage anything. I'm still a bit confused about the self-shorting function on the speaker jack. One wire is current carrying, that would go to the output tranny, and the other goes to ground, so where's the third tab on the jack connect? If anyone out there with a clue dropped me a line I'd be a happy clam.

Be Afraid

The Hi-Mu Amplifier company produced approximately one hundred amplifiers for sale to the public in its six year history...
... and then there were the prototypes, the test amps, the experiments, and the wild hares.
Amp Maestro Barry Breisch built one very special amp for himself. Old school and too cool with Streamline Moderne styling stolen from the very best commercial industrial design, the Vaculator!

But let Barry tell the story:
"The base is a double coffee pot warmer unit that I got at a flea market for $2. I tore the guts out of it, fabricated a flat aluminum plate to replace the top, punched all the holes for the tube sockets and transformers and turned it into an amp. I had to do this because of the word VACULATOR stamped on the front of it..."



This one-off amp is simplicity itself. It has an on/off switch, volume and single tone control. Regarding the circuit inside, Barry went nearly medieval:
"I designed the circuit to be as 'old-time' as I could make it. It uses 6SJ6 pentode preamp tubes (not 12AX7's) and an active tone control circuit (totally non-Fender) that I lifted from a 1940's Motorola home stereo amplifier system."

The single ended 6V6 tube that drives this beauty (or is it beast?) is characteristic of most of the amps Barry built under the Hi-Mu marque.

Here's a picture of her backside.



"The output transformer is the first Air-Gap Prototype that I approved for production. It was hand wound by V&F Transformers in Illinois as part of the process of nailing the air-gap output transformer design.
"The rectifier is a 5Y3GT and the power transformer is my standard (custom) V&F Transformer.
"Despite the vintage pretensions, the amp also has an effect loop which is decidedly non-vintage. I honestly can't remember if the loop is 'active' or 'passive', but I'll guess passive since my goal on this design was a minimum parts count. I almost never use the loop.
"There is no question that I have played this amp more than any other amp that I've built."

I want to thank Barry for the photos and info that appears above,and the Vaculator's schematics posted below.


So check back, comment or shout out a hello. fred

Three flavors

Hi-Mu amps never came in more than three flavors: 7 watts, 12 watts and 18 watts. This was 12 years ago, long before the low-watt amplifier renaissance. All of Hi-Mu amps were delivered in the same cabinets, irrespective of the amps watts. One could chose either a combo version with a 12 inch speaker or a head version. For a $50 up-charge you could get tweed, Fender-style black tolex came standard.

While a huge stack of Marshall 4x12s looks really cool, most performance venues use a public address (PA) system rather than trying to fill the arena with the amps the band brought. A properly mic'ed amp doesn't have to pump out a lot of watts to get the right sound. Studio players have always known that great tone can come in small packages, and few people are interested in trying to record or listen to 200 watt amplifiers in a little recording room. While the stories of Duane Allman's Fender Super Champ (18 watts) and Jimmy Page's low watt Valco amps are widely discussed, in the early to mid-90s there weren't a whole lot of amp builders producing low-watt amps. Hi-Mu was one of the few, its top of the line amp only put out 18 watts.

Here are three 1990 era catalog entries on those three Hi-Mu amps.
First below is a catalog description of the 7 watt standard single 6V6 power tube amp.



Next comes a 12 watt version, driven by a single 6L6 power tube.



Finally Barry offered a 18 watt version of his amp, driven by two EL-84 power tubes. He suggested it was basically half of a Vox AC 30.



For the player wanting an amp that also had a three spring tank reverb, Barry offered an up-grade to any of his single channel amps for $150.

Party like it's 1995

If you were smart enough, or lucky enough, you'd have known about the Hi-Mu amp in 1995 and could have asked for a catalog. Here's two pages from the catalog Hi-Mu's mastermind, Barry Barish, would have sent you. If you had a little coin in your pocket back in 1995 you could have purchased a custom-built, hand wired, point-to-point, 18 watt 'boutique' amplifier in real tweed with a 12 Greenback for less than a grand!



Check out the prices!
The same quality of amp today would set you back twice the price at least.
I'll be posting specs and more pictures from the catalog for those interested.
By the by, a tip of the hat to Steve at Do It Yourself Amps, who also is a Hi-Mu fan, and from whom I 'borrowed' the original pdf that these images come from.

Noise washes you clean

I keep an electric guitar and an amp next to my computer whenever I can. Five years ago, while working at the SF Examiner, I purchased a cheap acoustic Fender guitar from the pawnshop around the corner to leave beside my desk for anyone who might pick it up in need of those moments that require the inner solitude and introspection a guitar can bring in a place of chaos. Several months after I’d left, a former co-worker told me what she missed most was the quiet sound of the guitar while she wrote her daily quota of news.

My guitars and amps give me great pleasure. I’m especially pleased with the instruments I've managed to rescued from dis(re)pair. Pictured above are a Gibson The Paul and a mid-60s Fender Showman cabinet I was able to resuscitate. The Hi-Mu 5.5 amplifier is another story, it came to me whole and full of life.

I purchased the Gibson for $125 when I was working as a production artist for the SF Weekly back in the late 1990s. It was cheap because someone had started to dismantle it for future improvement.
The future turned out to be too far away for the fellow that started the project.
Originally the guitar was black but when I received it the former owner had scraped off most of former paint. The pickups and other hardware also were random replacements so I didn’t have any hesitation finishing his strip job, re-contouring the body, adding an after market mother of pearl headstock logo, refinishing the guitar in antique cherry, replacing the pickups with Fralin humbuckers and the hardware with vintage original gold plated Gibson equipment. It’s not collectible but with a decent set of strings it sings and looks good.

The Fender cabinet, sans speakers, was a similar find for $50 on Craigslist. A pair of inexpensive and dysfunctional mid 60s Jensen 15 speaker were sent to Audiovex for re-coning with Celestion Greenback cones and for less than $200 I had a great sounding if a tad ugly cabinet. Someday I'll recover it in new tolex.

The Hi-Mu wasn’t so easy, but then again, it didn't need anything. Using my research skills I traced down the original builder, Barry Breisch, at home. He stopped building amps in the late 1990s but it turned out he no longer was playing his personal amp and offered to sell it to me for a reasonable price. It arrived in immaculate condition, as though it had been carefully lost in the mails in the mid-90s and magically arrived on my doorstep a decade late.

Not a day goes by that I don’t turn the amp to ten, the guitar to a similar level, and create a quiet empty peace in my head, letting the amazing, cleansing sound wash over me. It’s renewing in a way that only holy music played loudly can be.

This post was originally written for my other blog, which is typically about politics. If you're interested in a LIBERAL perspective on the world you are welcome to check it out at www.tourettesdujour.blogspot.com

Be well and live in peace.

Hi-Mu High Gain Prototype amplifier

Here's a Hi-Mu prototype low watt, high gain amplifier I recently acquired on eBay.
The amp came without tubes or speaker or even a cabinet, and with the warning that it didn't work! I'm hoping to bring it back to life.

Clearly it can be seen by the pictures above and below that this amp was a work in progress. Barry Breisch, the designer, used an existing chassis and pop riveted patches over the amp's cutouts to create an amp architecture that was suitable for his needs.

Here's what she looks like from the control panel.

From this picture you can see that Hi-Mu used a black print on white design for the earliest versions of the amp. Most Hi-Mu amps in circulation are white lettering on a black background.

Here's a picture of late generation production version of this same amp, in a cabinet, using white lettering on a black chassis.

For those interested in her innards, here's Barry's hand-drawn schematic for this prototype, it's basically your standard English-style, mid-1960s EL-84 design.



For comparison, here's a standard Mullard EL-84 design of the era.

Hello Hi-Mu amp lovers

I'm a Hi-Mu amp fan, lucky enough to have three, count 'em, three Hi-Mu low watt amps. This site hopes to become an homage to the Hi-Mu Amplifier company's great products. I'm looking for any information anyone out there might have, and I'm happy to share the information I have. If you're a Hi-Mu fan, or a low watt amplifier fan, please feel free to weigh in with your opinions. I don't know too much about the technical side but I plan to learn and share. I can be reached at fdodsworth at comcast dot net.