Crate V5 mods... anyone?

[cebreez]

Is this thread dead? HELLOOOO!!!

[SciHi]

Is this thread dead? HELLOOOO!!!

HELLO and welcome. Jim P. had posted very early some fixes if you want to keep the opamp, I think most of use just removed it and modded from there... It is hard to get much headroom, at any volume, out of a single EL84. You can get good overdrive and it will get loud when the EL84 is being driven hard but none of the little 5 watt single end tube amps have much for clean headroom. The speaker is probably the biggest single improvement to the amp, in my opinion, the most important first mod. My experience is the tubes have much less impact, unless you want to run a lower gain tube such as a 12AY7. Put in a decent speaker, and keep the gain turned down and it should at least be usable.