Alligators in the sewers, clowns in various urban settings, Paul McCartney’s doppelgänger, pop-culture is riven with myth and legend. Guitar amplifiers, not so much – they are rarely the subject of such fevered imagination.
But there are exceptions, such as that “urban myth” amp that has been some 20 years in the making and involved Eagles’ Joe Walsh. No, we’d never heard that one either but apparently it was a thing, and now, apparently, it is a thing – a built-to-order tube amp with prices starting from an eye-watering $14,999.
The amp is called the GC-1, or the “GC-1 3 Band Opto Compressor Amplifier” as it says on the control panel, and it is being made by G-Craft Audio. The design of the amp is described as being a two-hander between Walsh and master audio engineer Brian Thompson.
“They had only one goal: create the best amplifier ever made, no matter the cost,” says G-Craft Audio. And you can now order one direct. The “urban myth” might have been debunked but there’s still more than a little mystery to this G-Craft Audio build.
The company has shared details of the signal path online, and the story of the amp’s design. But we are yet to hear the amplifier in action. There are no video demos yet, not even an embedded SoundCloud audio clip. These, presumably, will be in the post.
“It’s an amp that defies the impossible,” says G-Craft Audio. “The few who have played it say it’s like a spiritual experience, but you’ll have to find out for yourself.”
You can found out all about the genesis of the amp design in the 18-minute documentary on YouTube. Thompson speaks gently, is quietly eccentric, and knows exactly what he wants with all this. The speaker had to be 15” – “fairly large” – and it needed to be high-impedance, rated at 150-ohm. Cue the camera panning into Thompson as he repeats this. Ted Weber, the engineer he asked to make such a high-impedance speaker was not so sure. Thompson laid out his case.
“I said, ‘Well, because I have this vision, this idea that it might be very interesting to have this high-impedance speaker because we would be transferring more voltage than current into the voice coil and the rendering is going to be very interesting.”
Unconvinced, Weber kept at it. It took him a month. And it was very difficult. This is the recurring theme – and it’s probably why an amp like this costs so much money.
What that money buys you is an all-analogue amp with “ultra-low noise” and pure signal preservation with lossless voltage stepping and just writing this feels like a foreshadowing of its second life as an urban myth when the GC-1 (not to be confused with the Fender x Roland Strat) becomes a holy grail amp a la Dumble amps.
Just look at the front panel. This is something a different – a three-band dynamic EQ and optical compression with threshold and gain controls for the highs, mids and lows. Under the hood there are three KT88 power tubes in parallel. The amp is rated at 60W RMS.
That high-impedance speaker is voiced to match the amp and is rated on the site as 70-ohm. Technically G-Craft is calling this a rerelease with some design tweaks but can an amp so shrouded by myth ever have been released in the first place?
Philosophical intrigue aside, you can check out more specs, read the story behind this release and – gulp! – order one at G-Craft Audio.
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