I found this on Ebay it was in the wrong category, so I got a great deal on it. I am not sure exactly when it was made. From what I have gathered from some research on the web I can safely assume it is very old. It was made by the Kay Musical Instrument Company. And according to Wikipedia The Kay Musical Instrument Company was founded from the assets of the Stromberg-Voisinet Company, by a fellow named Henry “Kay” Kuhrmeyer. Kay used circuit designes from the old Stromberg company and in the mid 50’s Henry outsourced production of amplifiers to their competitor Valco whom build amps for quite a few companies during the middle of the 20th century.
I have searched all over the web and have not seen anything like this small amp. When I took possession of this gem, I could tell that it had been re-capped sometime in the early 60’s due to some of the soldering not looking so original.
This amp sounds amazing and is very quiet, except for some light crackling due to the old carbon comp resisters in the signal path. We also have a field coil speaker on this little guy, which is basicaly a transformer choke that does double duty as an electromagnet in the speaker. There are 4 tubes in this amp a number 80 rectifier (a 4pin version of a 5y3 common in quite a few vintage amps) – a 6N6-G ( a self biasing dual triode), in glass coke bottle style envelopes, and for the preamp there are 2 metal tubes 6N7 and a 6C5. There are 2 inputs and one red chicken head knob.
Vintage Kay Amp from late 30's or 40's
look at the size of those caps
This amp uses a field coil speaker - basically an electromagnet instead of a fixed magnet
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- Vintage Kay Amp from late 30′s or 40′s
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- look at the size of those caps
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- note the new electrolytics at the top
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- This amp uses a field coil speaker – basically an electromagnet instead of a fixed magnet
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- this is a 10uf at 50v
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