Hey Guys,Greg_L wrote:zarfnober wrote:There are photos in the very early days where he ran 2 heads into a full stack. IIRC, the channels were also jumpered on each amp, checkerboard cabs and the blue guitar. But you can read his book, where he says 1-4x12 full, one empty. But there were always spares.
I haven't seen any pics of Johnny jumping channels, but those old Super Leads could be daisy chained with a little creativity (Hendrix did it), we know he used a A/B splitter as an on/off switch, and he could have ran two heads into two cabs as a stack. But that would be unbelievably loud for just about any venue they would have played in those early days and two heads can't go into one cab. It would blow that cab to pieces, or the amp's transformers would nuke themselves right away from the impedance mismatch. I don't claim to know what Johnny actually did, but I know those amps and cabs intimately. I have them and have been using them for years. So I'm just thinking out loud here. The only way he was using more than one head at a time was if he was using more cabs than one, and like you mentioned he said in his book that he quickly switched to only using one cab. But when I saw them later on in big venues, he definitely had guitar sound coming from Dee Dee's side of the stage, so at that point he was running his main amp feeding multiple cabs, or a second amp sent to the bass side.
My own personal assumption from reading his book, seeing bunches of pics, knowing those amps very well, and using those amps myself in similarly sized venues, is that in those early early days he ran one amp and one cab for sheer noise consideration, and the other amps and cabs were stage props and/or backups. The second/third amps that appear to be on and connected could be running idle ready to go as a backup, or his guitar could have been split to feed more than one head feeding multiple cabs. Some of those Super Leads from that era could power four cabs at once, but you couldn't run more than one amp into a single cab. I tend to believe that he ran his guitar into a splitter for his on/off switch, which we know he did, then that went to both amps with one being on standby, or it went to another splitter side-stage in case of an amp breakdown, where Mickey could switch amps on the fly.
Another assumption I have is that Johnny is rolling his eyes at us from heaven as we try to dissect his stage rigs. Sorry Johnny, this stuff fascinates me and we just love you dude!
No offense considering this is a very interesting subject with the amps, but I would say you guys did a
complete 180 from the "Mosrite II pickup question" in which this subject first started......