An amplifier with the headroom of a small power plant and the midrange of a polished bell.
The brief
A clean platform that takes a pedalboard without choking. Big, glassy midrange. Loud enough to fill a room without going into compression. The reference was the Hiwatt DR103 — the head that's behind half of Pink Floyd's clean tone and most of what David Gilmour does on a black Strat.
I did not try to re-invent it. I drew on the topology, used what I knew of the lineage, and concentrated effort on the component choices and the output transformer.
The output transformer is the soul
There is a tendency in modern tube-amp design to treat the OT as a part you buy. That misses the point: more than any other component, the output transformer dictates the bandwidth, the bass tightness, the upper-midrange clarity, and the way the amp responds when a pedal hits it.
I had this one custom wound in Italy — Partridge-style geometry, extended bandwidth to 100 kHz. The audible band is 20 Hz–20 kHz, but transient response inside that band is set by what the transformer does outside it. 100 kHz means the leading edge of a pick attack arrives intact instead of smeared.
Hand-wired, end to end
Turret board, point-to-point. Every solder joint touched by a human hand. The shortest possible signal paths. Military-grade components in every position that influences the tone.
This isn't romanticism: a PCB amp shifts ground currents in ways that influence noise floor and high-frequency behaviour. Hand-wiring lets the topology of the actual conductors match the topology in the schematic — and that audibly matters at the resolution this amp aims for.
What it does
Stays clean far past the point where most amps have gone into hair. Takes an overdrive pedal in front and lets the pedal sound like itself — not coloured by the amp's own breakup. Gives you that Hiwatt chime in the upper midrange that turns a humbucker rhythm into something that cuts without screaming.
It is, deliberately, a player's amp rather than a tone-shaper. The pedals decide the character. The amp decides the resolution.