How I Did It: Hartley Peavey of Peavey Electronics | Hacker News Reader

How I Did It: Hartley Peavey of Peavey Electronics

inc.com

58 pointsjkuria25 comments

I grew up in Mississippi playing Peavey gear dreaming of designing it. Now, I have a PhD in electrical and computer engineering. I don't do audio electronics, but I might not have even considered EE if not for this man.

Back in high school in the early eighties I played with a bass player who had a Peavey amp and right in the middle of a concert something exploded and his 4 speakers all blew out. Luckily there was another guy who could loan his amp but our bass player was pretty upset (and broke) so I offered to try to repair his amp and we all chipped in for new speakers.

Anyway, this guy had a bird and its usually open cage was usually on top of the amp, which had a ventilation grill on top. When I opened up the amp it was full of bird poop baked onto everything. I like to think the poop had something to do with the failure because I really like Peavey stuff in general. After a thorough cleaning it didn't take long to figure out that the filter caps after the rectifier of the power supply had blown and a huge 50Hz (Germany) ripple was sent out to the speakers.

I got some caps with more margin (the original parts only had 3V of margin over the worst case expected surge) and with the new speakers we were back in business.

Fast forward 30 years and I'm now a bass player myself and I have to say that Peavey is still great for budget gear, especially their basses. Of course there's really nice budget gear in general now, due to China and the general downward prices on electronics.

I go to a country jam now and then and the bass player there has a ton of vintage gear (he's pretty vintage himself) but for everyday playing at the jam there's of course a Peavey combo that works great every time.

I like the way this article is written it's very concise.

I noticed that too. It seems like it's formatted to make skimming easier, but that actually caused me to read the entire thing.

Peavey writes: "I go out on the factory floor and I see a resistor on the ground, I pick it up. That's a penny to me. You see a penny on the ground, you pick it up."

This seems to contradict the saying 'he who thinks in dimes will never become a millionaire'.

For every saying there is a contradictory saying.

I think the phrase about thinking in dimes refers to not realising where true cost lies.

You will find some business people that cost themselves thousands in staff time to save a few hundred bucks on some software that could improve the efficiency of their business, for example.

for me, my first encounter with Peavey was when the rich American kids from the international school came to my school for concerts and sports. They had Peavey speakers and Reebok sneakers!

That's funny because (as a rich American) Peavey amps were known for being inexpensive, but LOUD. When you're a 14 year old guitarist and you need big volume without big bucks, you go Peavey.

Rich kids got Marshall. Or Mesa Boogie.

That is my memory too (Australian) - Peavey were cheap but reasonable. Loud, reliable but sounded pretty bad. Mesa was certainly top end boutique.

I play guitar and this is still very true today - Peavey deals mostly in the lower to medium bracket and their most legendary (and "premium") amp is beloved for just that: (comparatively) cheap, reliable and a distinct sound.

Interestingly enough, another guitar amplifier company that could be considered VERY premium started in a very similar way: modifying and building their own gear just out of frustration with (back then) existing gear and lack of money: http://diezel.typo3.inpublica.de/history.8.0.html

Actually, Boogie did too: http://www.mesaboogie.com/US/Smith/our_story.html

True for any number of companies, including Marshall/Orange/Sount City/HiWatt in the UK, pretty much ALL of which got into business after being recruited to build louder amps for The Who.

Having bought 10's of thousands of dollars of sound equipment over the years, much of which was from Peavey...this is pretty cool.

Same here. A lot of the gear I've bought has come and gone, but I've still got my Peavy Backstage 20 ... the first amp I ever owned.

when i was in a band, peavey was low end. everyone always wanted a mesa boogie or a marshall.

Sure, and it's still the same way now, but their stuff is affordable and it works. I like their basses and guitars best, they're a really good value, and they do make higher-end amps that sound pretty good.

This is a very inspiring "so I just made my own stuff" story but then again, I think the music instrument business and especially the market of guitar players has got to be a horrible example for hackers.

Imagine your customers swearing by and specifically asking you to produce hand-wired tube-based computers with punch cards that run as fast and reliable as modern PCs but at the same time they will shun pretty much any innovation you try to introduce and then just spend 4 to 6 figures on some old tube-thingy from the 50s or they over-spend on some very small boutique shops that swear they are building that tube-computer just like they did in the golden days and they swear they only solder during full-moon and its only done by virgins, so they charge you triple-premium for it. And then they tell you "hey, RMS is actually using that thing" and then they pay RMS lots and lots of money so he will take pictures with that thing while actually working on a small modern *NIX PC behind the stage/under his desk.

Aside from HiFi gear, I doubt there is another industry SO full of emotional marketing, dark obscure magic and so much mis-information accepted as fact as guitars and especially guitar amps.

"Aside from HiFi gear, I doubt there is another industry SO full of emotional marketing, dark obscure magic and so much mis-information accepted as fact as guitars and especially guitar amps."

Similar industry -- so it might not count as a separate example -- but the high end of the market for speakers and stereo equipment is nuts. There's not as much romanticism and near-mysticism as there is in the guitar market, but there's plenty of uberexpensive, tube-thingy tech from the 1950s. A buddy of mine has a setup in his living room that could reasonably pass for an ENIAC panel at first glance.

Nice rant, but, what if there's a perceptible difference between tube and solid state technologies?

Just because it cannot be objectively measured doesn't mean it doesn't exist.

It can be objectively measured. Tubes tend to produce even harmonics, which are pleasing to the human ear. The even harmonics sound like octaves of the original pitch, creating a rich sound. Solid state tends towards a mix of even and odd harmonics. The odd harmonics are not pleasing to the human ear because they produce pitches not easily resolved to the intended pitch.

Ironically, solid state amps can have a lower total harmonic distortion than tubes but produce a sound less desirable to humans (in general).

That's not what he wrote. He's talking about hand-soldering (vs PCBs) and using certain components or technologies that work really well when marketing but have no effect or even a detrimental effect on sound. For example, people want Class A amps, not Class AB ones, even though the designation is purely a technical one and is not correlated with sound quality.

The difference between a tube amp and a solid state one, by the way, is one that you can objectively measure through spectrograms.

Re: A vs AB.

The difference is the fundamental mode of operation with different distortion characteristics. Class A amps will have both odd and even-order harmonics but class AB will be mostly even-order. That is both an audible and and electronically quantifiable difference.

If you are talking sound reproduction then A vs AB is insignificant because you only see the difference when the amplifier starts distorting. If you are a guitar player who drives an amp to distortion as a matter of course this difference is germane.

Ah, I see now. Thanks.

I have to admit, I just emphasized on what is strange or downright wrong about selling guitar-related gear. There certainly are a lot of great companies out there and if you swear you hear the difference or just like their products and can afford it, then by all means, more power to you! I myself am prone to spending big bucks on gear myself...

I just find it funny when you take a cynic look at it from the view of a hacker and not a musician/artist. Guitar players and selling gear to them is somehow a whole different ball game compared to, say, bass players who are generally much more open to new stuff.

There's a certain mystique specific to the guitar, it seems...or there's a billion more guitar players, perhaps?

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