moltenmetalburn wrote:Hey AG I absolutely love the tuna style can !!!
what type of lid did you use for the bottom?
AG yer killin me with that tuna can. and of course with the proper mojo caps inside. I can't speak to those people, but the review I wrote earlier in this thread was what I hear from a couple years of using the Smooth and Slim. I'm sure I must have received the manual, but haven't seen it in years. When I looked it up online, it says pretty much what I said. So, I'd say it does what it claims sound wise (can't speak to realignment of frequencies part). I purchased the Smooth and Slim because I heard it dealt well with the flabby bass on a Fender. I hadn't read anything about increased sustain getting rid of the icepick highs. However, I was pleasantly surprised to find that I got those things too. So, for me it wasn't a matter of being biased by the claims.moltenmetalburn wrote:Check out the HC reviews, people seem to love this thing, I wonder if the hyped up manual explanations and background information have psychologically biased these people or if there are any truths to these claims;
"The realignment
of frequencies takes away what shouldn't be there in the first place, so the new
sound is much more focused and contains less transients, which results in improved
sustain perception."
http://reviews.harmony-central.com/revi ... 0Slim/10/1
soulsonic wrote: It's really damn hard to defend a couple caps and resistors used in a common arrangement to solve a common problem in a manner which any moderately educated technician would have done as a matter of common sense.
But anyway, despite my poo-pooing the Smooth n' Slim, I think the passive "correction" circuit has its place and I'm tempted to build my own attempt at the S n' S/Harmonic Converger concept.
rocklander wrote:hairsplitting and semantics aren't exactly the same thing though.. we may need two contests for that.
Some of this quite changes my perspective thanks for sharing!Some background.
Gil Ayan used to post in Ampage and in the Boogie Talk mail list. I think a couple of the Mesa Boogie schematics that are on the net were contributed by him.
From what I remember, the S&S was not a proper "business", it was more like someone at the boogie list would e-mail him and ask, Gil, please build one of those things for me, and he would do it in his spare time. So problably the different caps are because that's what was laying around.
The S&S is not gooped and while he never published the schematic, he never hid that the slim feature was just a series cap for bass cut and the "smooth" was just like a guitar tone knob turned down, and encouraged people to try different caps that sounded best with their guitar, amp and style.
Here's a schematic he published with mods to the Mark I boogie:
http://www.blueguitar.org/new/schem/mesa/
When he published this, he said to look at the input cap mod to learn what the slim part of the S&S was.
http://www.blueguitar.org/new/schem/mes ... _mod_1.jpg
BTW the idea of cutting bass to help keeping the bottom end of amps tighter is not new, many many people used treble boosters for that. But since Mesa amps have more gain than fender blackface amps, I think Gil realized that just shaping the bass was enough, the extra gain of a treble booster would be too much in that case. For a Fender I'd rather use some simple treble booster.
I've seen lesser concepts patented; probably its the pedal arrangement makes the simple circuitry patentable. In a perfect world this would prevent anyone from making a similar product and selling it, however he's probably not a big enough fish to defend the patent. If you want a good chuckle concerning patents, check out some of Randall Smith/ Mesa Engineering's patents. He actually has a patent that specifies the use of a large value resistor in the screen grid supply of a tube power amp. If the value is large enough, it helps the tone as you get sag under overdrive conditions. So if you build a standard tube power amp with a screen grid supply using a resistor instead of a choke, and it is arbitrarily large, Randall can sue your butt for patent infringement. If he can get this, Gil should get one for his as his concept is a much better one.soulsonic wrote:I think the concept of this thing is alright... it serves a useful purpose, but well... I'm with unbeliever on this; any attempt at patenting this would be a waste of money. It would be thrown out as soon as it was challenged. A patent is only as valuable as its ability to be defended. It's really damn hard to defend a couple caps and resistors used in a common arrangement to solve a common problem in a manner which any moderately educated technician would have done as a matter of common sense.
It's a passive tone control; it's on the market in a thousand forms...PurplePeopleEater wrote:You may be right, but if it's a common solution that any "moderately educated technician" would have come up with, how come nobody else has marketed it ? The word "common" would suggest that it would be "widely known", therefore you would expect to see it on the market in several forms.soulsonic wrote: It's really damn hard to defend a couple caps and resistors used in a common arrangement to solve a common problem in a manner which any moderately educated technician would have done as a matter of common sense.
