THE PHILOSOPHY
The mission we had in our mind when we created the Precious Tones was to create what we thought was a perfect amp.
Through the years of our tone quest we had all you could ever dream of! Vintage and boutique amps : Marshal, Fender, Vox, Dumble style, Matchless, Bad cat, Hiwatt and many more…
This is the result of a constant search for a BETTER sound. It was already many year ago when we started to question all the rules in our search for development of impossible.
We started by moding on amps, changing tubes, speakers, transformers and so on to finally build clones and moding them radically... we have clearly tried every possible capacitors type, resistors type and different filtering.
After many years of trials and errors we were finally close to what we wanted to achieve: Finding the Hendrix, Stevie ray Vaughan or Philips Sayce kind of sound….
After that, we naturally became completely consumed by our new project. We spent many endless nights talking about our ideas and plans when at one point Sebastien said "lets build our own amp company and share our achievements and expertise also with the others! I am absolutely confident that if we work hard together, we can achieve something really big and bring the value to the others."....From that moment, it was clear - we had to create a brand.
It didn’t take us long to agree on the name. The idea steamed from the desire to incorporate a name of a precious Stones to the name of our amps. We were considering Saphir, Emerald, Diamond .... we liked how it sounds and …(it is no secret by now) that it was the most important for us 😊
it was not a long way from there to realize that the right choice for us will be : PRECIOUS TONES .....
that night we chose the name, the corporate identity, the colours …most of the important things to get us started were decided at that special evening.
CREATING THE AMP
We decided to start from scratch, we already had a schematic that was really good so we took that one and agreed on the basics like transformers, tube type, tube reverb, head style, etc
Then what about the board ... lets take the best of the two world,
The idea was to redesign an simplify to the max the layout, improve it to place every component to the ideal position, then calculate the best trace size to be the exact same as if it was a wire, so we searched for a pcb supplier and found the one to make us something special the way we wanted it !
So we had a design, a board, a schematic,
Lets create the chassis, where we gona place the parts, enought space between tubes, transformers, board, everybody at the right place
We implement our best and prefered features to tweak the amp, because yes a good design is a good start but we all have different taste and in different situations...
So we wanted to make these amps versatiles..able to adapt
The main mods we wanted was
Hi and Low power switch
Cathode and Fixed bias
Penthode and Triode mode
Negative feed back value switch
Complete bias test points to optimize the seting and sound to taste
We also implemented one of our favorite mod we tested and loved trouhgt the years, the mod we called rough
The journey continued trough developement and testing.
Tube type, tranformers type, pots, caps filtering caps and value (there is a switch for that too ) reverb tank type, and also reverb transformer model , resistors ( metal film or carbon ) we literally spend hours and hours to test different protoypes.....