Winfield Thomas Cyclone

amps
You might also
be interested
to know that
the quote we
referenced
from Jeff
Bakos was
offered during
a telephone call before we had even mentioned acquiring the
Princeton. We frequently compare notes on what’s ‘hot’ in the
vintage amp world, and the 12 watt Princeton Reverb’s elevated
stature and value in 2012 can be attributed to the same qualities
described by Dave Boze in our very first November 1999 issue
of TQR. If you play a single coil electric in the style of a Stratocaster, Telecaster or Jazzmaster, nothing quite delivers the lush
and liquid clean tones of a Princeton Reverb. And of course,
there is the reverb… Granted, the tremolo in the Princeton has
always been a little weak, but that’s the only weakness to be
found in this amp. Turned up from 6-10 the Princeton gradually spills over into increasingly thick and musical distortion
that doesn’t discriminate between humbuckers and single coils
like some other amps. All of our guitars sound extraordinary
through this little amp, not so little now with the addition of the
Red Fang 12. The voice of a great blackface Princeton Reverb
simply delivers an entirely unique and different soundstage
from all the other blackface models. Perhaps that’s why we
spied a blackface Princeton miked behind Mike Campbell’s Vox
Super Beatle stacks when we saw him with his L.A. band in
Anaheim a few years ago. The Princeton’s clean tones certainly
seem deeper and wider, and overdriven, the Princeton possesses
a smooth and penetrating tone richly gilded with harmonic
overtones and extreme clarity. Clarity and distortion? Well,
yeah, that’s really what you want from a Fender amp. A Supro or
a Gibson cranked is going to deliver a murkier, muddier, funkier
quality of distortion, and that sound definitely has its place, too.
But the Princeton Reverb stands alone in it’s ability to provide
crystalline clarity and depth played clean, and equally captivating overdriven tones that can be heard on Jeff Beck’s early
‘Orange Album’ Memphis tracks produced by Steve Cropper.
Listen, vintage amp prices are down a little right now, but
demand for the smaller classics like the blackface Princeton and
Deluxe Reverb remains high for obvious reasons. There are only
so many blackface amps to go around, and the reissues don’t
sound like the originals. Indeed, the demise of the Accutronics
company in Elgin,
Illinois has virtually
guaranteed the end
of Fender reverb
as we once knew it
(unless you replace
your new tank with
a vintage correct
reverb pan from CE
Distribution and Amplified Parts.com). As we stared at our
computer monitor on December 16 pondering whether or not to
buy the ‘64 Princeton, we considered one question: What other
amp could we possibly buy for $1500 today that can equal the
sound of Princeton Reverb at that oh-so friendly volume level,
while earning a permanent place in our music room as an ultimate keeper for recording, home use, and small clubs?
Here’s the deal… With vintage amps, original speakers are
irrelevant. Most of them blew a long time ago, and if they
haven’t, they surely will, and you have a much better selection at hand today than at any time in the ‘60s. We have also
come to a point in time where vintage-correct transformers are
being built with far more consistency and precision today by
companies like Magnetic Components, Mercury Magnetics,
Heyboer, and Mojotone. Don’t be turned off by the prospect of
replacing a replaced transformer to get a great deal on a classic amp. As far as capacitors and resistors are concerned, we
prefer to find amps with intact original circuit boards so that
we can make our own decisions on what should be replaced.
And remember
this – there is a
difference between
what might need
to be replaced for
an amp to be made
truly roadworthy
for heavy gigging, compared to
an amp you will only play at home. What we don’t want is a
vintage amp with all the original caps replaced (and especially
with orange drops). Yes, we’ve said that before. Hey, we love
a lot of contemporary custom amps built by very talented
custom builders, in fact, you’ll be meeting one in a minute, but
if the sound of a vintage blackface Fender really lights your
fire, and 12 watts fits squarely in your wheelhouse, you can do
this, and if you want a 12 inch speaker like ours, you can buy
a replacement baffleboard cut for a 12 with grillcloth attached
from Mojotone and simply park the original baffleboard safely
in a closet. Time has come today for your very own vintage
Princeton Reverb. Quest forth… TQ
Winfield Thomas Cyclone
Once again, a reader directed our attention to another small
custom amp builder in a very unlikely part of the world.
Talking to amp builders about their craft is always interesting… Speaking with ‘Winnie’ Thomas, a native of Staten
Island, was a revelation on many different levels. We love
New York, always have, and not just for our favorite haunts
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TONEQUEST REPORT V.13 N.06 April 2012
15
amps
and the energy of
the streets, or the
fact that Mrs. Wilson
(Liz) was living in the
West Village at 4th &
Broadway when we
first met. Plenty of
memories were made
there, but it is the people of New York that
really make the place
what it is – the greatest city on Earth. Talking to Winnie was
a real kick for us because he has one of those voices that just
naturally imparts humor and irony to simple declarative statements with no effort. His is a smoothly tempered voice entirely
suitable for radio or a stand up act, and it made a fascinating
story all the more interesting. Should you call him to discuss
an amp, you’ll understand, and we hope you do. Enjoy…
TQR:
a band at the
small Vermont
state college I
was attending
needed a guitar
player. So I
became the
rhythm guitar
player and we
made a record
in 1965 that
went absolutely nowhere. Forty years later it began to appear
on compilations of unknown ‘60s music and we were interviewed by an online magazine called Ugly Things in 2006. If
you google the band Mott’s Men you’ll find it. We were playing down in Philadelphia at some hops put on by a DJ there,
but the band broke up because the other guitar player couldn’t
leave his girlfriend, which was just as well, because with my
history I probably would have died if we had ‘made it.’
We have to ask… Where is Cochise, Arizona?
TQR:
It’s a ghost town, actually.
It’s about 80 miles east of
Tucson, and the entire county
is known as Cochise. It
extends from north of I-10
to the Mexican border, and
from the border of New
Mexico halfway between here
and Tucson. The village of
Cochise consists of a school,
a post office, about seven houses and two abandoned historic
buildings. It’s unincorporated. Greensboro, Vermont wasn’t
much different, which is where I was living when I started this
business, but I was born in Staten Island, New York.
TQR:
Do you have a musical background or is it more
technical?
I played the devil’s instrument for four years – the accordion.
My father was a Lawrence Welk fan… I also played soprano
bugle in the police athletic league marching band on Staten
Island. I bought my first
guitar in 1957, but I really
didn’t learn to play it until
around 1963, and by then I
considered myself to be a folk
singer. I would walk over to
The Village and play for loose
change and come back and
give the change to the bums
in the Bowery. I went back to
college after flunking out the
first time, still a folkie, and
How did all of this lead to you eventually building
guitar amplifiers?
When I got out of college I continued to play both country
and rock & roll in New Jersey, New York and Pennsylvania
and I started building speaker cabinets for a guy in Ledgewood, New Jersey named Tommy Barth, who owned a music
store there. He would give me the speakers and hardware and
I learned how to apply tolex and I would build cabinets for
him. In 1979 I relocated back to Vermont playing in country
bands, and I eventually just got sick of playing for a while.
TQR:
Where can you make a living playing country
music in Vermont?
Oh, my goodness. There was a
whole circuit of what they call
the “animal clubs” there – the
Elks Lodge, the Moose Lodge,
the Lions Club… I was just tired
of looking at drunks so I quit for
awhile and the only thing I kept
was my flattop. I got remarried,
and one day I decided I wanted to
play again and I bought an Ibanez
Artist guitar – the same basic
guitar that John Scofield played,
John Scofield
and then I couldn’t find an amp I
liked. I had screwed around with electronics a little and I could
read a schematic, so I decided I was going to build my own
amp. You may have heard of the AX84 Forum – it was featured
in Guitar Player several years ago and it’s populated by a group
of builders. Randall Aiken had built his version of an 18 watt
Plexi Marshall, I corresponded with him and suggested we put
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16
TONEQUEST REPORT V.13 N.05 March 2012
amps
four output tubes in it. We did that, and then I started building
the amp. You know how it is – you get better the more you do
something, and I had a few false starts, but I eventually got it
together and the amp was a Plexi Marshall circuit but with four
6V6s. I initially called it the November Project on the AX84
Forum, but because of a copyright on the name I just called it
the Winfield. Today it is different from the original amp, but
if you look at the schematic, it looks a lot like Plexi Marshall,
which is not too different from a tweed narrow panel Bassman.
I build a 5 watt, and 18 watt and a 30 watt version. The 5W has
a single-ended octal tube – you can use a 6V6 or a 6L6, the
18W has two EL-84s with a master volume, and the big one is
four EL-84s with a half power switch.
the Cyclone, I used to build Matchless Spitfire clones using
the old Hammond reverb amps like Dr. Z did, until they began
to get too scarce and expensive. Looking at the schematic, the
Spitfire was very similar to a Vox AC-15. The only difference
was that he used a doubled-up 12AX7 instead of an EF86,
and he added a tone control. For the Cyclone, I went back to
the original AC-15 that had a normal and a vibrato channel.
I focused on the normal channel that originally had a volume
control, a brilliant switch and a cut control, and I put in a tone
control and master volume with an EF86. I also use a power
transformer with more current available than an original AC15, and a larger output transformer. My amps have started out
being copies of original designs and they have evolved.
TQR:
TQR:
As opposed to a pentode/triode switch…
Right. I don’t like the sound
of a triode. You need the
whole pentode. Triodes
sound fine for hi-fi, but not
for guitar. The original 5
watt amp used one EL-84, a
12AX7 and a 6CA4 rectifier
tube. About ten years ago I
sold my first amp, and I’ve
been averaging about twenty
amps a year. I built a model I
call the Elizabeth that is my take on a blackface Fender named
after a dog that would howl every time I picked up a guitar.
The dog I have now, Amy, sleeps through band practice in the
middle of the floor of the practice room. The Brat is another
model named after my daughter. It has a full tone stack with a
cathode follower like a tweed Bassman, but with a power amp
that’s configured like a tweed Deluxe with EL-84s. I’m building a version now with a rectifier switch so you can choose
between a solid state or tube rectifier.
TQR:
So the chronology began with the 5 watt Winfield,
the Elizabeth and the Brat. On your web site you
note using a ceramic magnet Weber California with
an aluminum dustcap.
Yes, in the style of a JBL,
and I use the Eminence Legend speakers. There are two
10s in the amp we sent you
for review. The response in
that amp with those speakers
is just phenomenal. I use two
16 ohm speakers in parallel
for an 8 ohm load, and since
I use what is basically a
large 40 watt Pro Reverb output transformer, it makes a big
difference in the way the amp sounds. Before I started to make
And has that been a result of your own evolving
approach, feedback from customers, or both?
A little bit of both,
but I learned that the
larger Weber output
transformer I use really
makes a big difference in the way the
amp sounds. I tried a
Heyboer and I even
tried a transformer with
multiple taps and they
didn’t sound the same. I build more amps now with 10s, too.
TQR:
What have you learned about component selection?
I use carbon film resistors and generic yellow tubular caps,
and they all work and sound fine. Do you know about Apex
Junior? Steve Slater has a warehouse business and he has been
supplying me with parts for years. He buys stuff in very large
quantities and
sells them at
very reasonable prices.
For example,
his 47mf 450
volt caps
are usually
$2-$4 each elsewhere, and he sells them at $1.25. A lot of big
companies buy from him too, just because he beats wholesale.
I buy Alpha pots made in Taiwan and they work just fine.
CTS pots are very nice, but they are also twice the price. We
had to increase the price of the Cyclone slightly because it is
being sold exclusively through Rainbow Music, but as a result
of that I am selling more amps, and Harvey at Rainbow is
also buying speaker cabinets from me. The head cabinets are
still made by my cabinet maker in Vermont, and his work is
just flawless. The speaker cabinets are made here in Wilcox,
Arizona and I cover them myself.
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TONEQUEST REPORT V.13 N.06 April 2012
17
review
TQR:
v
Are are they all made from pine?
Yes, and they are very
resonant. We use birch
ply for the baffleboard
but the cabinets are all
pine and I think it makes
a difference.
TQR:
What’s your take on tubes?
I use JJs, and for EF86s I have been buying Russian surplus
Svetlanas. I bought a batch of 50 and some of them are noisy,
but you know what? They sing like no other tube. I think
they were originally designed as a microphone tube. I have a
Westinghouse EF86 in my personal Cyclone, but the Svetlana
sounds the best in my opinion. The bottom line is how does
the amp sound when it’s all put together?
TQR:
Do you find that two ‘identical’ amps that you have
built sound different?
All the time. The parts
have a variance in the
actual values and when
you put them all together, of course there is
some variance. Harvey
at Rainbow Music will
hear one that he will
comment on as being especially good. Every amp is a little
different, just like every guitar. Did you use the power cord that
came with the Cyclone we sent? It’s a cheap Chinese $1.75
power cord and Harvey pointed out that the amp sounded bigger with that cheap cord, and it does. Don’t ask me how or why,
but try the amp with one of your other power cords and then try
the cheap one we sent. Everything makes a difference.
TQR:
It sounds as if you have landed in a great place to
operate a small amp shop.
I’m really happy to be here.
The band I’m in is the best
I’ve been in for years, and we
have four good voices out of
five guys, which is unusual.
We play a couple of roadhouses, and we play down in
Bisbee, which is a funky old
town on the Mexican border.
We’re having fun.TQ
www.winfieldamps.com, 520-384-6017
www.60sgaragebands.com/bandbios/mottsmen.html
18
REVIEW
The Desert Cyclone
Have
you
ever
looked
under
the
hood
of an
original Mark Sampson era Matchless DC-30? If so, you know it
to be one of the most obsessively overbuilt amplifiers ever
put into production. We can’t imagine how many man-hours
were required to solder and bolt a vintage DC-30 up, but they
survive today as a tribute to one man’s obsession with tone at
any cost. It was a heady ride while it lasted. Intended to honor the original Vox AC30 with none of the inherent challenges, the DC-30 definitely earned a place in the vintage hall of
fame. The sound and voice of the 15 watt Winfield Cyclone
offers a bit of that special Matchless DNA, but our first
impressions also revealed a sound that is far less constrained
by comparison. We always thought that our DC-30 and the
two vintage candy panel AC30s we have owned sounded
as good as advertised, but their complex circuits also lent
a certain stodgy stiffness that could be difficult to unleash,
and downright impossible with humbucking pickups. More
comparisons… While the Cyclone seems to have been more
directly inspired
by the AC15 and
the Matchless
Spitfire, most
of us have probably never heard
a real Vox AC15
in good working order, or a
Spitfire for that
matter – but you
would be correct in assuming
that they sound
very much like half of an AC30. If we were to compare the
Cyclone to a modern Vox AC15, which is, by the way, a very
good amp previously reviewed here, the Winfield can best be
described as producing a somewhat looser, airier and more
forgiving tone that is less dry and strident than the Vox. The
harmonics lurking within our guitars are more vivid in the
Cyclone, and the overall fidelity seems richer, deeper, more
detailed and interesting. This isn’t a complicated amp, and
perhaps that fact also contributes to its pure tone. No reverb,
TONEQUEST REPORT V.13 N.06 April 2012
review
no trem, just a classic Cut control to manage treble and presence, Master Volume, Tone, and Volume.
Fundamental
to the sound of
the Cyclone is
also the 2x10
open back
pine cabinet
loaded with
two Eminence
Legend 10s.
As we played
through the Cyclone with all of our guitars we were reminded
that nothing sounds quite like an open back 2x10 cabinet, and
having heard this one, we realized that we needed one, with
these 16 ohm speakers. Even if you don’t really need another
amplifier, you might want to consider buying the cabinet.
Could be a real life changing experience for both home use
and gigging. That’s a hint. Aside from the typical percussive
quality of dual 10s, we marveled at the extraordinary bass
response. The 15 watt Cyclone easily sounds more like 25
watts through the Eminence speakers, but again, 10s have a
way of delivering the goods with no pain. This amp can get
loud enough to fill a room, but it does so with a kinder, gentler
attitude and a total weight for the head and cab of just 15 and
25 pounds respectively. Your 50 watt head collecting dust over
yonder would become ‘eminently’ usable with Winfield’s little
cabinet. Another hint.
Back to
that low
end…
Playing full
chords
through
the
Cyclone,
all the chime and detail you could want is present and vividly
accounted for, but the big surprise comes when you venture
down low on the A and E strings. A lot of smaller amps just
can’t reproduce lows very well, and the output transformer is
often to blame. Now take a look at the huge 40 watt Weber
Pro Reverb output transformer perched on the chassis of the
Cyclone. That’s money, and yes, your jaw is likely to drop
when you experience the lush fidelity of the Cyclone and that
big, tight bottom. This is a rare and significant phenomenon in
our opinion, and one to be fully exploited and savored. If your
wallet hasn’t begun to creep out of the back pocket of your
jeans yet, you aren’t paying sufficient attention. Hey, you’re
not reading another cookie-cutter review in Guitar Maniac:
The Purist’s Guide to Fine Axes, Beautiful Asses and the Ruthless Pursuit of Fabulous Living…Come on now!
When
we
first
received
the
Cyclone
the
Svetlana EF86 exhibited a faint metallic rattle typical of modern
EF86s, but the more we played through the amp, the rattle
diminished. Have no fear – any such microphonics are entirely
justified by what you will hear pouring out of those speakers.
Now, you can push the Cyclone into distortion, but this is not
a high gain amp endowed with intense, grinding overdriven
tones in the style of an ‘80s Marshall head. Extreme volume
settings will produce perfectly crunchy, chimey rhythm tones,
or a moderately busted up sound for solos. Since the Cyclone
occupies a cleaner space, any distortion or overdrive pedals you
wish to use will sound all that much better through this amp.
We used a Bob Burt clean boost, Wampler Plexi-Drive, EWS
Fuzzy Drive and an RC Booster all with great effect and exceptional tonal purity. Clean signals always sound better going into
a boost or distortion effect in our opinion. ‘Dirty’ pickups and
cranked up amps just don’t mix well with your best distortion
devices. Clean up yer tone, then step on yer pedal.
Having spoken with Winnie
Thomas, it seems that his
intention in building the Cyclone was simply to design
and build an amplifier that
sounded really good, and
equally unique when compared to many other booteek
amps. On the other hand,
he doesn’t seem the type to
spend much time thinking
about what other people are
doing. Building a lone wolf
sounds simple enough, but
perhaps not considering that
every guitar amplifier of note has been knocked off by now,
or at least marketed as such. What we find so intriguing and
appealing about the Cyclone is that it does indeed possess a
truly unique sound, yet familiar enough to awaken memories
of classic guitar tones that sound better than ever experienced
through the prism of Thomas’ vision. Living in a place where
our galaxy is so vividly revealed in the night sky and moonshine casts long shadows beneath the majestic saguaro, we can
only guess that Winfield Thomas has landed in a place where
peace and clarity were not so hard to find. His work reveals it.
“Built by a man at peace.” We’ll buy that.TQ
TONEQUEST REPORT V.13 N.06 April 2012
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