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The first Sound City guitar amps were created in England in 1967. They were reborn by Neal Ostberg and Steven Fryette in 2018. These products represent an evolution of the 1967 design. At the core, these amps deliver sublime power-amp-tube saturation and expressive feel.
Heritage. Jimi Hendrix, Marc Bolan of T-Rex and Pete Townshend & John Entwistle of The Who are just a few of the musicians that played through Sound City amps. Here is a video of Jimi at Miami Pop 1968: https://youtu.be/_PVjcIO4MT4.
Jimi used a single Sound City One Hundred amp (likely the same one from the Axis session) briefly during the latter part of the 1968 North American tour, from around mid-March to April/May (see Miami Pop photos). The amp seemed to have been used together with one of Jimi’s old Marshall JTM 45/100s.
In 1966-’67, Sound City amps emerged as one aspect of Dallas-Arbiter’s drive to corner the British music-gear market by supplying budget-priced yet extremely functional and good-sounding equipment.
- UK/Europe Use only
- Customised Sound City L100 Specs
- 4×12 Cabinets
The Sound City amps were used only in the UK/Europe until around July 1968. In 1967 to mid-1968, Pete used Vox Super Beatles or Sunn amps in North America. Initially the reason for the difference in gear was that the group could not afford the cost of importing their full gear and, instead, hired or borrowed gear once arriving in the U.S. Because o...
The controls on the customised L100s were identical to the CP103control layout. From left to right, the controls: 1. Four inputs 2. Volumes 1, 2, 3, 4, 3. Treble 4. Bass 5. Master Volume 6. Standby 7. Mains Early versions had various block script Sound City nameplate badges, but beginning in late 1968, the badges were removed so that some were unba...
With the Sound City amplifiers, Pete used various 4×12 speaker cabinets through 1968, incuding Sound City’s 200w 4×12 cabinets, as well as Marshall 4×12 1960A/1960B and/or 1982A/1982B cabinets. In mid-1968, he used Sound City’s 200w 4×12 cabinets, with some rebadged to Hiwatt by late 1968. For 1969, the rebadged Sound City cabs gave way to Hiwatt 4...
This connection could explain why these earlier Sound City amps had such clean, mil-spec-like wiring, which was strikingly similar to (and is one of the hallmarks of) the wiring in Hiwatt amps and in Harry Joyce's eponymously named line of amps.
The History pages that follow offer what I've uncovered about Sound City, Dallas Arbiter (DA), and Dallas Music Industries (DMI) since June of 2002, when I began this research project.
